Dan Ramsey and David Hughes - The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solar Power for Your Home

Ever wonder what it would be like to be able to make all your electric power on your own, and permanently cut your ties to the utility company? Or would you just like to reduce your monthly electric bill from your current power supplier? The Complete Idiot's Guide To Solar Power For Your Home will help you with either of these projects, though it will not supply all the information you need. While the book covers a broad range of topics, and generally explains them well, details are sometimes absent where they are needed.

Much of the Complete Idiot's Guide To Solar Power For Your Home is spent introducing and explaining basic concepts, not only basic to solar power, but basic to the things you'd need to know to understand solar power, including electricity and its related terms, ohms, amps, watts, etc. You get basics on climate patterns, seasonal variations in sunshine in different parts of the country, how to calculate watt and amp loads for household appliances, how to figure out how many batteries to use for a storage solar system, and lots of other things. That may sound like everything you need to know, but it's not, though it's a good start.

So much of the book is devoted to the basic components of a solar power system for your house that relatively little of it is left to building, maintaining, or troubleshooting the complete system. While obviously you're going to learn a lot of these things on your own if you decide to have a solar power system installed in your house, some additional information on the quirks and pitfalls common to private solar power systems would be very useful. Do solar power installations increase your homeowner's insurance? Do neighborhood covenants commonly get invoked to prevent people from installing solar power? Do you do best to build a separate shed for your batteries, instead of keeping them in a basement or garage? How difficult or easy is it to make the solar panels yourself, and save a lot of money?

I could ask other questions, but I think I've made my point. If you accept the book's presentation at face value (and it's accurate for what it presents), then solar power is an expensive to very expensive option to grid-supplied power, and you will not be able to get away completely from the power company unless you made some fairly radical changes in your electric power use. Examples? You won't be able to run electric heat in your house from solar power unless you super-insulate it first. Do you have central-air? Then a solar power system probably won't be able to run it for you, unless you're willing to spend big bucks on it. (Fifty-thousand and up sound good to you?) Even things like a refrigerator-freezer, or an electric dryer, may be too much for the solar power system you can afford. You'll need to find other ways to run your (formerly) electric items, like buying propane powered equivalents, or do without.

How much does it cost to have someone install a solar power system for you? About $8,000 - $10,000 per kilowatt (one thousand watts). That means, worst case, about $10,000 for a power system that gives 1,000 watts per hour of peak sunlight intensity where you live. How much is that compared to your typical electric bill? Look at it this way. I use an average of 600 kilowatts of electricity a month, and I have gas heat. Just for an example, if one could get a 1 kilowatt solar system to make 5 kilowatts of electricity per day, every day, for a 30-day month, you'd get 150 kilowatts per month, or about 25% of what you need. Another way to look at it is that $10,000 investment saves you 150 kilowatts per month, or about $12 (at the rate of 8 cents per kilowatt we pay in Cincinnati).

Those numbers are accurate, but they just don't make good monetary sense. You'll do a lot better ignoring solar power completely, and spending the $10,000 on insulating your house, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, tossing your water heater, refrigerator, dryer, washer, air-conditioner, etc., if they're old or energy inefficient, and buying new ones that use less electricity (or switching to gas-powered models). You could cut your electric bill in half, or even more, just by doing that.

Still interested in solar power? I was too, which is why after reading the book I did a lot of looking, reading, and researching on the Internet. It filled in a lot of the holes the book left regarding details. Want to find a website that sells quality kits for building your own solar panels? It's out there, and you can build the panels for 40% of what it costs to buy them. Can't mount those solar panels on your home's roof because it's not built to take the weight? There are firms that will sell you portable solar panel arrays that are cart-mounted, and which can be easily wheeled to your back yard to catch the sun during the day, and put away at night. How about using solar panels for camping in remote areas, or places where electricity is not available? Businesses sell small systems that are very portable, affordable, and supply common power needs like a small refrigerator, lights, a radio, or even a TV.

You'll also find the Complete Idiot's Guide To Solar Power For Your Home is vague in parts that could be extremely troublesome for people. Just how difficult is it to find someone good to install the system for you when you don't live in a place where solar power is popular, like California? What are the general permits and costs for them you have to get to have a solar power system installed? Dealing with local government is too much for some people, and, to be fair, though it's not the focus of the book, some information on how to best start the process would be helpful.

Some of the basics in the book could be better fleshed out, especially some of the details about batteries used to store solar electricity. More information about the newer types of batteries, like absorbed glass mat (AGM) could help; the batteries are better than typical lead-acid batteries for solar power, because they don't leak, and don't emit explosive hydrogen gas. Also, a little more critical information about how batteries act when you draw power from them is important. For instance, the faster you draw power from a battery (or bank of batteries), the less power the batteries can deliver. In other words, the faster you draw power from batteries, the smaller they act. How is this important? A battery, or battery bank, on paper that looks like it would be enough to power an electric-using appliance for hours, might only be enough to run it for twenty minutes. In some cases, it might not run the appliance at all, if it requires too much power for the battery to supply too quickly, the battery might be permanently damaged.

Related to this I found out, over several months of extra research and reading, that the cost of installing a solar powered system just to run a portable electric heater was prohibitive. Ever see those oil-filled heaters that look like little room steam radiators? Lots of stores sell them, including K-Mart and Walgreens, for about $70-$80. I thought I'd found a good use for a mini-solar system I could install myself; running one of those electric heaters to warm the second floor of my house during the winter. After reading the Complete Idiot's Guide To Solar Power For Your Home, I thought I could build a solar power system to run the heater for about $600, including solar panels and batteries. Wrong!! The additional research after reading the book led me to conclude it would take at least three-thousand dollars to do it. For now, I've forgotten about the heater.

I'm not saying that the Complete Idiot's Guide To Solar Power For Your Home is a bad book; it's not. It's a good start, but for the necessary details, you'll need to look elsewhere.