How I Imagine the House of My Dreams: Solar Powered

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For as long as I can remember, I have had a dream about building my own house. And not just any house. My idea of this house is it should combine beauty and eco-friendliness.

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. You don’t want to introduce some toxic stuff in your home. For example: formaldehyde – a very dangerous compound – is found in certain types of particle board. People actually get sick from breathing in formaldehyde fumes, even in low 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. Now, that was decades ago and nowadays it is not an attractive solution due to the increased cost of electricity.

Oil – same story there. Many years ago, oil was cheap and of course everyone used an oil-fueled furnace to heat their dwelling. The rising cost of oil is making this an expensive solution.

By spending a bit of money on better insulation, you can offset the rising energy bill. During the happy days of cheap energy, houses tended to be built with poor insulation. Back when oil was so inexpensive, spending cash on insulation was seen as useless.

Things have changed nowadays. You may end up saving half the energy bill by improving insulation if the house was really poorly insulated. Believe it or not, there are super.insulated houses that hardly need any extra heating. Conclusion: investing a bit in extra insulation is likely to save you money over time.

What you’d really wish for would be a solar-powered house. If you could make use of all the sunlight that falls on your hose, you wouldn’t ever need any other energy. It would be enough to run your (electric) car also.

This isn’t yet feasible with today’s technology. On the other hand, recent research has come up with better than forty per cent efficient solar cells. In other words: these cells can transform nearly one half of the sun’s light into useful electric power.

As you can imagine, these newly invented solar cells are not cheap to make. However, there are mass-produced solar panels on the market with a bit lower efficiency – and these are not very costly nowadays. Nowadays a number of manufacturers are producing photovoltaic cells with up to 20 per cent efficiency, using streamlined methods like continous printing.

Some do-it-yourself work can cut costs in case you decide to get home solar panels. Yes, you tend to save money by doing stuff yourself, with most home improvement projects.

And apart from the cash savings, you also have the satisfaction of being able to do your own thing.

Solar panels for homes are estimated to last more than 20 years once installed. Which means that even though they cost you a chunk of cash, you can save money down the line.