Returning the power to the grid can help you get paid back for your investment in solar power, especially if you live in an area where energy rates are high. That (along with high solar availability) is why solar is thriving in markets like California.

Cost of Converting Solar Power

Solar power is typically generated in panels that generate power in 12v or 24v DC arrays. We use 12v DC power in our vehicles but it’s not very useful in our homes. Some panels convert the power to 120V AC right in the panel while some people choose to store the power in batteries and then convert the power later. If your panels deliver 120V power then the cost is calculated in the panel cost. If they don’t the inverter you use will need to be taken into account in the cost of the solar power you’re using.

Cost of Storing Solar Power

The cost of storing solar power is extremely high. Overall the cost doubles when you choose to store the power rather than having a fluid system where the power just returns to the grid. So people choosing to “live off the gird” are paying a high cost to do so. The main cost of storing power is of course in batteries. The cost of memory storage has decreased rapidly in the last decade as memory capacities have skyrocketed. A 64MB memory card in 2006 was $37 where in 2012 you can buy a 32GB card for the same price. That’s 32,768MB’s or 512X the space. Solar and electric enthusiasts are optimistic that as people become more interested in electric and Solar power that we’ll see the same trend for batteries and the solar arrays as well.

Lastly, Solar power cost will depend on how  much power you’re using. Obviously once you make the initial investment you can use your system up to it’s limits all at the same cost. But choosing how large of a system you will invest in will be the largest factor in the cost of your solar power.

Dishonest Review Blogs

When you go looking for reviews you expect to find unbiased reviews. Just like MYSOLARBACKUP tries to take advantage of buyers unfamiliar with solar power they also take advantage of people unfamiliar with the internet. If you take a good look at what you think are unbiased review websites they’re in fact just a selling tool of MYSOLARBACKUP or the solutions from science people.

I was checking out one of the “review websites” that had targeted the keyword “MySolarBackup scam“. You can tell they’re targeting that phrase because of how they bold those words and work it into the first sentience.  Of course solutions from science targets this keyword because they know some potential clients will suspect that with their high prices that MySolarBackup IS a scam. If you think that the review site is legit you can try using your back button. MYSOLARBACKUP actually is bold enough to then say, Wait don’t go… we’ll give you this special deal.

Inflating customer expectations and Inflating prices

The second thing that is flat out dishonest that MySolarBackup does is inflating customer expectations like by showing them quotes like  “No more worrying about electricity bills”. This type of dishonest marketing really gets me upset because it gives solar power a bad name. To get to the point where you don’t need to worry about electricity bills you’d need enough solar panels to power everything in your home, changes are everything in your home uses more than 90 watts. As I’ve already covered, the costs of MySolarBackup are terribly inflated. So not only will it do less than their customers expect, but they sell it at at least twice as much as what would be a “fair deal”.

What Uses the most power in my home?

Heating and cooling uses the most power in a home. First the heating and cooling of the air in your home and then the heating of the water in your home. It’s hard to track the energy used by an air conditioner or electric water heater as installing a meter would have to be done by a professional.

How to Find How Much Power Everything Else in My Home Uses?

You can, however, keep track of how much energy everything you plug in uses with a kill a watt meter. You can then keep track of the costs using our convenient power cost meter.

A macbook pro (2008) uses about 40 watts of energy, but new computers are not only faster but more efficient as well. In netbook laptops the goal is often efficiency over performance as they typically perform simple tasks such as surfing the internet. Some netbooks actually limit their power consumption to under 10 watts under load! And you wondered why they’re a pain to use.

Another factor is the operating system. A computer running windows tends to actually run a few watts heavier than a computer running MacOS. Apple has certainly tried to create machines that consume less energy (are more green) yet provide a better user experience. When you start getting down to laptops with solid state drives and low processor consumption the display actually ends up being a big portion of the energy being used. This is the case with the macbook air, just as it is with the iPad.
The purpose of this post is to collect different kill-a-watt readings from various laptops so feel free to submit the power consumption results for your laptop in the comments! Here are a list of a variety of laptops and how they do while idling to give you an idea of how much power a laptop uses.

Idle Laptop Power Consumption

2012 Samsung Series 7 700Z3A-S03DE Ultrabook: 15 watts
2011 HP Pavilion dm1-3180eg Netbook: 6 watts
2011 11″ Macbook Air: 8 Watts
2011 13″ Macbook Pro: 6 Watts
2008 15″ 2.2 Macbook Pro: 40 Watts
2006 13″ 1.86 Macbook: 35 Watts

The main factor in the amount of power used by the iPad is the screen’s brightness. As I slid from the lowest to highest settings the meter would move from 1.8 watts to 5+ watts. So if you’re looking to extend your battery life the brightness is going to be the biggest factor. You can plan on the battery lasting much longer at night or in a dark room that you would using it outdoors (although the iPad’s glare is just awful outdoors so I don’t see many people doing that).

Processing seems to be a much bigger deal on the iPod as it has a much smaller screen (so it’s not as big of a factor) and a much smaller battery so the one or two watts more for heavy processing really takes a toll on an iPod where it’s not a big deal really for the iPad.

So how much power does an iPad use?

Seven watts is probably the most your iPad is ever going to consume (although I’d like to see an app that will challenge that). If you’re wanting to preserve battery you’ll just need to turn down the brightness. You could turn of things like Wi-Fi & Bluetooth but from my tests these only moved the meter 1 to 2 watts which is a big deal if you have them of for 8 hours, but if you’re trying to save a little so you turn them off for a half hour you’re not really going to be making a big difference in battery life.

There is good reason to be prepared. Disasters do happen, but the fact is with companies like solutions from science out there it’s not true that the more money you spend results in you being more prepared. So when searching for a solar backup system realize that you can save yourself a whole lot of money by buying the individual components. And be aware that there are companies out their looking to scam you to get Rich while making a so-so product.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate how a homemade solar backup compares with the cost of the flagship “solution from science” solar backup from MySolarBackup. The cost for that system is $1,797.00 plus “only” $150.00 Here’s the rough price list for MY SOLAR BACKUP that has the same specs:

To be fair these systems are different. The main loss with the homemade solar backup would be that you wouldn’t have the terribly overpriced all-in-one battery & inverter. You can always go to Walmart and get 2 $8 crates: one to store a battery and the other for your charge controller and inverter. There are better things you can do as well to organize your solar backup, but if you’re looking to go real cheap crates will provide the same amount of energy and functionality from your system. The other difference is that solutions from science provides a 50 ft cord. The one I found was a 12 FT extension cord rather than 50 ft. cord but you can always connect 5 cords together for a price of $145 shipped. Chances are you won’t need more than 12 ft. Not to mention your solar backup system is actually more efficient with shorter connections. You loose a lot more energy with extension cords when you’re dealing with a direct current system.

Battery

The battery is the most important part of your solar backup. I was surprised to see that this system offered only a 51 AH battery. The battery in the solar backup from solutions from science is a SLA (sealed lead acid) battery. SLA’s are the most common in small systems because they have the cheapest upfront cost per AH. You can get a 100+ AH Deep cycle battery from a local store for under $100. So with the money you save you could get 10x the battery storage.

LED Light Strips

First, you’ll need some LED light strips. These aren’t the most efficient LED’s on the market but they’re the cheapest and most convenient we’ve found for cabinet lighting.

Power Supply

LEDs operate on direct current, these specifically operate on 12V DC- the same as your automobile. If you remove the 12V power port from this power supply you’ll have a perfect power supply for your cabinet lighting system.

Dimmer

You may want to adjust the brightness of your cabinet lighting system, especially if you can do it for around $5. You can do it with this dimmer.

A few things to keep in mind

Adding the lights are easy. The LED strips have adhesive on one side that allow them to easily stick to your cabinets. One side of the lights has raw wires that can easily attach to your power supply. The other end has an adapter that easily fits onto most plugin 12v power supplies. You may want shorter strips and you can do that by cutting the lights wherever there are 2 solder tabs. When you attach the lights to your cabinet you’ll want to put put them closer to the front of the cabinet, unlike the photo below.

With the lights closer to the front of the cabinet you’ll be sure that they won’t be visible from a lower line of sight, like when people are sitting down.

The 3 mile trip took 2.25 AH or 95 Watt hours of energy- Just about everything my solar panels generated within a day. So with my current setup commuting to work on solar power isn’t 100% feasible but more like 50% feasible on pure solar power. It works well for me however, because I plug into the wall at work giving allowing me to charge at home using 100% solar power only having only one 50 watt solar panel.

There’s quite a bit to take into consideration when looking at how much energy is use commuting to work on solar power. Your speed has a lot to do with it. Just like any other vehicle, the more you push the limits of your vehicle the more inefficient it becomes.

Here’s a bit of what I learned from my first couple of weeks commuting to work on solar power: