Comments on: Suburban home entirely on solar power?

By: George

George — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:40:59 +0000

Yes is you used a geothermal system for your heating and cooling system.
References :
http://commercialgeothermalairconditioning.com

By: roderick_young

roderick_young — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:01:59 +0000

I would need a better idea of what you mean by average suburban home. I live in Northern California, on an 8000 square foot lot. I’d say we have enough area to heat our home in the winter, if we wanted to. We would have to heat directly through collector panels, of course, and it would be a larger area than the roof. Super insulation would also help. The winter lows in our area are only in the 30’s, by the way, frost but no hard freezes. We do not have air conditioning, but if we did, we could support it by using perhaps 1/3 of our roof area. We use 1/10 right now, and it keeps up with all our electrical needs, including the electric stove and oven, when we still had them, that is.

Whether it would be cost-effective to run everything off solar is another matter. Natural gas is relatively inexpensive, and it would be a lot of building to get enough solar heat collected and stored. The above is just to say that there is enough solar energy falling on the lot to supply all our needs, if it had to.

For someone further north, I’d say they would have to build their house deep into the ground and heavily insulate, but in the winter, with enough area, they could heat water and store it in the sub-basement.
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By: Texperson

Texperson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:54:59 +0000

The cost and size of the panels would make that idea impossible at this time. We had a solar company come out and evaluate our house and they told us, solar is no where near ready for home use. Some large buildings with flat roofs in very sunny areas can get some of their power from panels, but that's about it. They did mention that there are small solar kits for running hot water heaters. But the cost of installation would take about 10 years to recoup in savings on heating water.
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By: Joshua Jamaar

Joshua Jamaar — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:11:59 +0000

The point of it being called ‘Suburbia’, is that it uses more power than other home within’ a city, and the environment killing off the environment animals once lived…

Nobody will be successful with this nonsense.
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