DIY Green Home Improvement » Green Technology

LED Lighting, It it Ready Yet?

rcovington — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:34:54 +0000

Yes, oil has dropped 50% in the last year natural gas has been more than cut in half in the last year, so your electric bill will go down…right? I would not count on it and given the political situation in the world today, you must consider the impact your new home or home improvement will have on energy consumption. There is also the

LED GU-10 Lightbulb

possibility you may face large increases in your electric bill if Cap & Trade passes into law. LED lighting is fast becoming a viable option for you to consider in the design phase for your house. LED’s have a solid history of performance in commercial applications. Most traffic signals incorporate LED’s. The typical traffic light will contain 196 LED’s and will draw 10 watts. To produce the same light requirement with incandescent lights would consume 150 watts. Replacing all 260,000 U.S. traffic signals now using incandescent would reduce electrical consumption by 2.5 billion kWh annually. This is just the tip of the iceberg of savings in this one example. Maintaining the incandescent light bulbs in all these traffic signals is far more expensive than the electrical consumption. With and average life of 2,000 hours, a typical signal will have to have the bulbs changed at least 4 times a year. Some LED’s will last 15-20 years. The cost savings from the reduced replacement cycle should justify the cost of replacing the existing bulbs, even with a unit cost for LED’s which runs 50-60 times that of an incandescent bulb. But the savings do not end here. If LED’s started to replace lighting in the broader scope of lighting both residential we would see savings from the reduced need to build new power plants, reduced emission from reduced power requirements for the plants to produce, reduced recycling cost to process the burned out fluorescent and incandescent bulbs and a host of other energy and economic impacts attendant to lighting. They could also solve the dilemma of Mercury in CFL that we al face with the demise of incandescent bulbs slated to occur in 2012. The cost of LED’s is coming down as their use spreads. To date the light output and the color rendition have been the main inhibitors to seeing them spread to general lighting purposes. Both of these issues are finding solutions through research and development. There are lighting solutions for the home now available for residential applications. Quasar makes a fairly broad line of LED light solutions that will work for your home lighting needs. Even if you investigate them and decide they are not right for you, it appears that the industry is looking to make the transition easy once the light source gains greater acceptance. In the mean time, you should look at the possibility of using these in your new home. The benefits are very attractive for the investment. Just imagine if you did not have to change a light bulb for 20 years.

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Evaluating The Installation Of A Solar Power System On Your Home

rcovington — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:22:18 +0000

The decision to install a solar powers system is necessarily open to a great deal of work on your part to determine the economic feasibility and payback period. There is no doubt that a photovoltaic system is quickly becoming a viable method of generating a relatively significant percentage of your power demand. However, the capital costs of such a system are themselves, not insignificant.

In many states there are tax credits and incentives, both public and private to defray the cost. Tracking them down can be difficult. There are a few tools now available to help you do some intial analysis of the costs and benefits in order to establish a preliminary basis for you to advance your search for the answer. One is the Petersen Dean Solar Calculator.

The Petersen Dean Calculator (click the button below to access) factors in location, electric rates and most importantly, know Federal and State incentives and grants to derive a payback, internal rate of return and the impact to home value. to present a rather detailed consideration for you to start from.

Beware still, you need to do plenty more homework in order to make a well-informed decision. There will be many other places for you to investigate and some leg-work to confirm that some of the assumptions in the calculator (Availability of incentives and grants) are still valid. For a free download on evaluating a solar installation for your home see the “Downloads” page. The downloads are free to registered users. You may register on the downloads page or in the “Admin” widget box in the sidebar to the right.

Some may even be interested in building their own solar system. It is becoming more feasible with leaps in the technology. For more information of a technical nature on Photovoltaics see “The Energy Blog“.

Build Your Own Solar System

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Aleutia Pocket Desktop PC Uses Just 8 Watts Of Power | Green Technology

rcovington — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:10:47 +0000

The Aleutia E2 is a small form factor Pocket Desktop PC that runs on a 5 VDC power supply and weighs just over a pound. Capable of running Linux and Windows XP, the systems is a perfect, small, lightweight devise perfect for websurfing and e-mail. It will also cut power consumption over a traditional desktop by about 85%.

You can get more information here.

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