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Solar Energy: Let's Look At A Few Basic Things You Need To Know Before Building Your Own Solar Panels
DIY Report
So, you think it's time to make your own solar energy generator to decrease energy costs or have a non polluting source of energy for your household. Before you do that you need to know how it works.
Solar energy is created by rays of sun that reach our planet in just a few minutes after they leave the Sun's surface covering the distance of 93 million miles in a few minutes. After all, light is traveling with the speed of light. Earth's atmosphere takes in most of this energy and one third of the sunlight is sent back into space. What's left is what we can use to create energy.
Did you know that the largest solar battery on our planet is Earth itself? It can absorb about 174,000 billion kilowatts (kW) from the sun each hour of the day? All in all, by now you should know that the light produced on one sq m during a clear summer afternoon, is generating around 1000 watts.
Unfortunately, the biggest part of this energy goes to waste. The amount of energy that doesn't go to waste generates the winds and helps sustain life. Green organisms use it to make oxygen, animals and human beings need it to strengthen their organisms.
However, we have reached that time in our evolution where we can harvest more energy from the sun. You must know that the types of solar energy are direct or indirect, active or passive.
Direct solar energy is made when sunlight is striking a solar cell directly and electricity is created immediately. It directly changes, without any intermediate process.
On the other hand, indirect solar energy requires one supplementary step to change sunlight into useable energy. It's the case of hydroelectric dams and wind generators, transforming solar-caused wind, rain and other climatic interactions into power.
We can transform sunlight into some other type of energy by:
Solar water heaters: Sun energy is transformed into heat. During this process, the sun's heat is collected by solar panels which then heat water which can be used to heat households. The panels are often put on the top of a buliding or in a place where they have a lot of sunlight, and are introduced later into a system of tubes called "thermal collectors" to the heating source.
Photovoltaic processes: Unlike the water heating systems, through this process, photovoltaic cells absorb the sun's light and not its warmth, so light is changed into electricity. They are regarded as the future of power generating technologies and are often silicon-based pieces of material. Solar panels are made of many of such cells, put together.
Alec Deacon is a do it yourself kind of guy and creator of http://www.DIYreport.com, one of the best sources of DIY projects and plans. Topics like solar energy, woodworking, aquaponics and DIY in general are covered in daily articles. Comments are always appreciated so please feel free to join and share your thoughts and ideas.
Article submitted Sunday, February 05, 2012 & read 1 times.
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