Friday, October 23, 2009

Home Lighting with solar power

First you must remember my father was an Electrical Contractor when I grew up and I was trained from age 12 to 17 to be an electrician and for one year as an adult I actually worked full time as an electrician.

I was thinking about how if a day is sunny that one could separate the lighting circuits within a home and power all lighting circuits with solar energy that was stored in batteries. This could save the average home owner or home resident or even an apartment resident with a sunny balcony a lot of money over the years to run all their lighting circuits with solar. The only problem would be if you plugged into a lighting circuit plug with a hair blower, hair dryer or something that burned a lot more electricity. So what I'm saying is that your lights would have to be on a different circuit than higher voltage and amperage appliances.

But if all your lighting over the years was solar powered whenever the day was sunny enough that would save you a lot of money in grid electricity. I thought of this idea because of my solar powered garden lights that automatically go on at dark and stay on until the solar charged battery runs down which is usually about midnight until 2 am depending upon how much sun they received that day.

So even if your area does not allow permanently installed solar cells on your roof they usually can't say anything about portable solar cells in your back yard or veranda just like they don't bother children for setting up camping tents in back yards in the summer or like campgrounds don't bother motorhomes with solar cells on their roofs to keep their batteries fully charged.

One other important point in doing this. Unless you convert all your lighting to 12 volt or be like motorhomes with dual voltage 12 volt or 110 volt lights, you would have to otherwise get a 12 volt DC to 110 volt AC converter for this to work on standard 110 volt lights, and lamps long term.

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