It is projected that as reserves of non renewable fossil fuels fall, the price of energy will rise steeply. This is of course only logical and yet it remains a matter of serious concern for farsighted home owners. After all, if you are going to be charged at ever increasing rates for the same amount of energy the point of diminishing returns will be reached rather quickly.
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Ultimately, if the forecast energy crisis gets bad enough, people will be forced into rationing energy. Indeed, this is already the case in many poor countries of the world where the government turns off electricity from between two to fourteen hours a day in a bid to save precious reserves of fuel.
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The home owners who do not wish to be caught in the coming energy crisis would be well advised to make a few prudent preparations well in advance. One of these is to install both active as well as passive heating systems as well as energy generating systems that uses the photovoltaic effect to create the electricity form sunlight.
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In other words, what we are aiming at here is to be completely independent of dependency on the main power grid. The logic is so simple: the power grid depends upon fossil fuels. So if you do not depend on power grid, you are absolutely independent of fossil fuels.
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One of the best solar heating systems are the humble solar hot water panels. Water is an excellent retainer of heat, and all you have to do to see the truth of that statement is to leave a can of water out in the sunlight for a day.
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If you check the temperature of the water half way through the day, you’ll find that the sun has heated the water quite efficiently. Indeed, passive solar hot water panels that work by letting the sun directly heat the water are very efficient, much more so than electrically driven water heating that works from photovoltaic cells.
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Whereas the photovoltaic cells are notoriously inefficient generating electricity from just twenty percent of sunlight that strikes them, direct passive solar heating generates energy by absorbing all the energy of radiant sunlight.
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The panels consist of a section of pipes that heat the water and transfer it to a tank. The water in the tank is slowly heated by convection processes, and this process continuous until all the water in the tank is hot.
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This heating system can also be connected directly to the hot water system in the house, though if you do that it is necessary to have a back up system for the time of the day when the sun is not shining and of course for the night. Though strictly speaking, even your dependence on this back up can be reduced to minimum by increasing the size of the area covered by your solar hot water panels as well as the size or number of holding tanks.
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If one insulates the holding tanks, this further increases the efficiency of the solar hot water panels.
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Best regards,
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The Build Solar Team
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P.S Looking to find out more about Solar Hot Water Panel?
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