Make A Wind Turbine

For as long as I can remember, I have had a dream about building my own house. And not just any house. This house should be beautiful; but it should also be eco-friendly.

To be eco-friendly, or gentle on the environment, means a couple of things. The first thing in my view is to create a good environment inside the house by using sound construction materials. What you really want to avoid is getting some hazardous materials into your home. For example: formaldehyde – a very dangerous compound – is found in certain types of particle board. Formaldehyde is a gas which makes you sick, even in minute amounts.

Another important aspect is how you heat the place. Where I live, electricity used to be very cheap some years ago. Guess what – everyone figured they should use electric heating in their dwellings. As far as I understand it, this solution isn’t used much these days, as the electricity cost has increased a lot.

Same thing with oil. Back when I was a kid, I remember how everyone used oil to heat their home because it was cheap. The rising cost of oil is making this an expensive solution.

If you insulate your house better, you can beat the mounting costs of energy. Houses built during the merry days of cheap energy tend to have very flimsy insulation. People didn’t care to put money into better insulation when oil was so cheap anyway.

Things have changed nowadays. There are even cases where better insulation has reduced the energy cost by 50%. Believe it or not, there are super.insulated houses that hardly need any extra heating. So if you spend some cash upfront on insulation material you get it back in the long run.

Ideally, you’d want a solar powered house. Suppose you could turn all the sunlight which falls on your house to useful energy – then you wouldn’t need any other source. Even your car could run on that energy.

In practise, this isn’t possible today. But in laboratories, scientists have reached a more than 40% efficiency with solar cells. In other words: these cells can transform nearly one half of the sun’s light into useful electric power.

Of course, these cutting-edge solar cells are still very expensive. But solar panels with more modest efficiency are mass-produced, and getting fairly inexpensive. Nowadays a number of manufacturers are producing photovoltaic cells with up to 20 per cent efficiency, using streamlined methods like continous printing.

In case you would like to get home solar panels, there is money to be saved if you set them up yourself. Just like with most home improvement projects, doing it yourself cuts costs.

Besides the money saved, there is another nice bonus: self empowerment, ie. doing your own thing.

Once installed, solar panels for homes typically are expected to last for over 20 years. Which means that even though they cost you a chunk of cash, you can save money down the line.

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