Saving Energy
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How to insulate Walls and Windows in your Home
Exterior Walls
Attic and Ceiling Insulation in your Home
If the attic lacks an appropriate vapor barrier, the most efficient way of insulating it is blowing in 18 inches of fiberglass or cellulose.
How to Insulate an Older Home
A home that is over ten years old is unlikely to incorporate many energy-saving features in its original design. Nevertheless, there is no need to despair, to tear down and rebuild or to move out of your home. Rather, the home can be reviewed systematically in its entirety before determining how to stretch those renovation dollars for some good energy savings upgrades.
How to Choose Energy Efficient Small Appliances
The Energy Guide program was created to assist in the rating of "white goods", but what about smaller items and electronics which have no such label program?
What Are Air-Based Solar Collectors?
The vast majority of solar thermal installations are based around solar collectors which use a fluid for thermal transfer. However, there are some designs which use air as the transfer medium.
Air collectors are just like their liquid counterpart flat plate collectors: they come in a frame that's insulated on three sides and glazed on the fourth, they have a flat absorber plate, they're of similar size to liquid-based collectors and they work in a similar fashion.
Large Hot Water Storage Tanks
If you're planning a solar thermal installation for a large building or a communal property such as apartments, you may need to consider a very large water storage tank. This is also true if your project is solar space heating – both of these installations require outsized tanks. Think big: we're talking between 300 and 500 gallons, here.
Positioning Solar Thermal Collectors
If you're installing a solar thermal system in a location that gets a lot of direct sunlight and you're doing it on an industrial scale, you might want to consider concentrating collectors. Unlike normal collectors, these won't work with indirect sunlight, but they're a lot more efficient than any of the other types if your location, scale and budget allow their use. Concentrating collectors use the simple scientific principles of focusing light to concentrate the sun's energy onto a single point.
The Basics of Photovoltaics
Photovoltaic panels (or PV panels) are typically flat, rectangular boxes full of cells which capture the sun's energy and turn it into DC (direct current) electricity. This current can be converted into AC (alternating current) by means of an inverter and used in a normal, grid-connected home.
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