Category — SOLAR

LaMar's off grid cabin

I just love learning how other people live off grid, especially when they are doing it in a very similar way to how I live. LaMar Alexander has done all of this and more, we may be in different places, but we both started out with small and simple systems, cobbling together this and that, building an independent life one piece at a time.
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Solar newbies beware

Don’t believe the awful ads which promise you “free power for $200″, or “build your own solar panel for $200″. Several of them appear on this site from time to time, despite that we are doing everything we can to stop them.  Many are from Chinese spammers, and a particular bunch of conmen called energy4free, or earth4energy or Get-Cheap-Solar-Panels.com, amongst many other aliases. These slimebags ask you to pay for an e-book which directs you to some other sites and offers to sell you components for a solar panel that will never work. Of course it would be quite wrong and immoral to suggest you should click repeatedly on their ads whenever you see the Earth4energy logo. We do not recommend that. (more…)

The head of one of America’s biggest Utility companies has forecast that it will soon be cheaper to harvest energy from your roof rather than from the grid.

David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy, is not your typical power company executive, as becomes clear from his interview with a Yale University  student magazine, e360.

NRG is a Fortune 500 company producing electricity for up to 20 million U.S. households. Crane is still neck-deep in hydrocarbons, with more than 90 percent of NRG’s electricity production coming from natural gas, coal, and oil. Crane  believes the electricity market is about to be transformed by the widespread adoption of solar panels on residential and commercial roofs, and electric cars in garages, (more…)

Utilities can't handle universal solar

Further evidence in favor of Micro-grids and against the so-called Smart Grid.

The runaway take-up of rooftop solar panels in Australia has undermined the electricity supply system, feeding so much power back into the network that it is causing voltage rises that could damage household devices such as computers and televisions. This means we should either rewire every home and every street, to suit the convenience of the big Utility companies, or rethink the way the nation’s energy delivery is organised. What applies to Australia is true elsewhere in the world. (more…)

Homesteading, it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people, back in the day, it meant getting land for free as long as you lived on it and improved it for x number of years. It was a way to get people to move west (in the USA), back when travel was slow and painful, even dangerous.
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Hanging to dry...

It’s funny how your perspectives change as you grow. When I was a kid, I used to be embarrassed because my mom hung our laundry out on the line to dry. I hated the smell of line dried clothes, sheets and towels, to me that meant we were poor, we couldn’t afford a dryer. All of my classmates had soft, fabric softener fresh smelling clothes, our clothes, towels and sheets were stiffer and to me were just second rate.

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The Off-Grid 2.2k Power kit

Let us Power you Up!

Off-Grid.Net has launched the Off-Grid Energy Design Service. We specialise in large-scale projects, but launch with a perfect low-cost starter kit: The Off-Grid 2.2k (pictured).

Whether you are an installer, a real estate developer, or an off-grid community, we can design your entire renewable energy system, delivered for under $5 per watt. Wherever you are in the world, our Off-Grid Energy Design Service can deliver a complete package at a competitive price.

Our design and production team have in-depth experience of every kind of energy set-up . The Off-Grid energy system designers consist of skilled, senior European design Directors with degrees in Physics and Engineering, plus veteran Chinese engineers, brought up in a society where there was no grid — ready and waiting to create the perfect, tailored system for your needs. (more…)

Hop to store before its too late

On July 1 this year, government subsidies for solar panels will be reduced by around $1000 ozzie dollars, so savvy energy-savers are racing to get the best price on a system.

“We are seeing a real surge in home-owners buying solar panels before July 1 and my advice is, if you are thinking of having solar panels installed, you’re best off doing it sooner rather than later,” says Australian Solar Energy Society chief executive John Grimes. (more…)

The Rodriguez and their off-grid chicken coop

Ideology , security, solitude: there are many reasons why people move off-grid. Hitherto “cosmic rays” has not been one of them.

Yet fear of what has been called by NASA ‘a solar Katrina’ is precisely what prompted Larry Rodriguez, 54, and his wife Sandie to flee Florida for a former chicken coop in Pennsboro, West Virginia.

“The bad weather we are having in the world is because of the solar storms now happening because the sun is ramping up,” says Rodriguez. “We are the kind of people that want to be ready for anything and I’m hoping that it isn’t true but all of the signs are in place.”

Grid vulnerable to solar storms

It would be easy to dismiss his concerns as apocalyptic, But the ‘signs’ he refers to are detailed in a series of increasingly urgent statements by NASA, which reveal a very real possibility over the next three years of a solar storm that could knock out the entire power grid, crippling modern society for weeks or even months. (more…)