Understanding Energy Guide Labels
Frankly, it’s not normal to carry around an energy meter when you’re shopping for electrical appliances.
Frankly, it’s not normal to carry around an energy meter when you’re shopping for electrical appliances.
There aren’t many people who would be content with a home that is not equipped with major electrical appliances, entertainment systems and computers. It isn’t wrong to have and enjoy a large-screen TV (unless you watch it the whole day!) or air conditioning. Using the energy to run the equipment is not the issue. The issue is purchasing inefficient models and, worse still, employing polluting and non-renewable resources to run them.
As gasoline prices jump yet again, for perhaps the tenth time this year, many people are planning to reduce driving. There may be a few who will toy with the idea of trading in their Hummer for a less gas-hungry vehicle. Family budgets get tighter as the cost of living increases from taxes, repayments of mortgages or loans, home energy bills, and vehicle maintenance and usage.
The incandescent light bulb is one of the inventions that has impacted our lives most. Before Thomas Edison’s discovery of electricity in 1879, it was pointless staying up after sundown.
Compact Fluorescent Lamps
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.
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.
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.
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.