Solar panals for my home?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Back after a hiatus when I actually had to work for a living - and my boss made me actually work instead of reading the SDMB!

Anyway, here’s what I stopped buy to ask about:

I recently took a trip to New Mexico, where I met a very interesting gentleman who runs a rock shop. This is totally irrelevant, but if you ever go to Rockhoud State Park, stop in at the shop about 2 miles north of the park. It’s worth it to see the amazing collection of geodes and agates they have, and to listen to the owner talk - he’s amazing! I think he’d fit right in on the SMDB - in fact, he may be one of us already.

Wait a second, I just hijacked my own thread. Back to the subject at hand…

They have a solar panel out front, which seemed to me to be about 6 feet by 9 feet of array. He mentioned the cost of the panels and installation was around $15,000. This gave me extreme sticker shock, as my husband and I have been thinking of purchasing an array for our home, to help alleviate soaring energy prices.

I’m looking for some information on solar panels that might give me a better idea how much energy various panels put out, and what the inital outlay is versus what our savings might be. I like the thought of going over to a source of energy that might have a bit less of an environmental impact, as well as saving some cash.

When I did a Google search, all I seemed to come up with was unintelligable technical articles, postings by oil companys debunking solar power, and dealers who had no specs on what they were selling. Any ideas on where I can find some consumer information on solar panels for my home?

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while i don’t think this on the scale you intended, it’s still pretty good.

http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html

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There’s a lot of magazines out there on solar power and Mother Earth News Magazine usually has some good articles on solar power. There’s also been a number of threads in General Questions about them. Generally, solar isn’t cost effective unless you live in an area that doesn’t have access to an existing power-grid. In that case, it’s almost always cheaper to switch to solar than to pay to have the power company run lines out to your house.

Some books you might also want to check out are:

Earthship by Michael Reynolds. (It talks mainly about building a house out of tires, but there’s some good information about solar panels in it as well. He’s got a site that’s helpful as well.

There’s also The Natural House Book by David Pearson which details both passive and active solar systems.

You can also check out these sites for more info:

http://www.sierrasolar.com/index.htm