Solar Panels, Smolar Panels. Who needs em?

Alright, after my last post I got some good remarks and some others who thought I was a little too soft at the end, but you know what, its my blog and my opinions :). I am glad that I can actually see these followers though.........(that is your cue to become a follower.)

Anyways, I was looking at some prices for solar panels for homes lately and was blown away. I read from a website that in order to power your home with Solar energy using Solar Panels you would need 41,000 square inches of Solar Panels to get 350 milliwatt hours per day. Just so that is written in pure English for all of us (please laugh really hard at me if I miscalculate) that would be 3416.666666666666666666667 square feet. For the average energy usage I calculated for a Central Air Conditioner. This is amazing, are you ready.......... In the energy calculations we need to convert the Milliwatt Hours to Kilowatt hours. This conversion factor is 1 milliwatt hour = 1.0 x 10^-6 Kilowatt Hours. So for that Solar Panel that would be collecting energy up to (notice the "up to" you probably wont get that all the time) 350 Milliwatt hours per day, you would be getting 0.00035 Kilowatt Hours per day. If you ran your AC during the summer for 30 days a month for 10 hours out of the day (I don't know if that is typical but I tried to pick a low number) you would use 945 Kilowatt Hours per month. That would be 94,500,000 Milliwatt Hours per month. But luckily you have those awesome Solar Panels that can get you 10,500 Milliwatt Hours per month. Wait that isn't even a fraction of the energy needed to run your A/C? Hmmm.

But wait, I haven't given you the awesome price of this wonderful Solar Panel. For this wonderful solar you can receive it for 600 easy payments of $26.66667! *or you can pay $16,000 up front. But wait, If you actually want to save that energy that you are getting for rainy days you can get the wonderful Battery system! *it will only double your cost of the Solar Panel and no we will not be throwing this item in when you call.

How could you walk away from such a great opportunity like this. You will never find the Sun's energy more expensive anywhere else.

Now you you can say it, "Solar Panel, Smolar Panel. Who needs em!"

Thank you to Google, Wikipedia, How Stuff Works, and Mr. Electricity.

Links to Some Interesting Recycling Stats

I know we are American but check out Australia stats over the last 10 years.
Australia Recycling

How are the United States doing?
USA Statistics

Recycling is Inconvenient!

Recycling has been one of the biggest trends over the last five years. Ever since I was in Elementary School in California I have learned about different ways to conserve water, save energy, and recycle. Since I grew up with this idealogy I have always been a huge fan of recycling and water consumption. Though I haven't been the best about doing these things, it is always in the back of my head that I need to help the environment by recycling and conserving water.

Now you may be thinking, "This guy is pretty lazy, if he wanted to recycle he could easily sort through his garbage and then put it in different bags and take it to a recycling bin near by." If you are thinking this then you might or might not be able to see how inconvenient this is. Why would I hang up more than one garbage bag in my small apartment and sort through everything to recycle when I can put everything in one bag and send it on its way every Thursday morning?

In California growing up, about 15 years ago, they started the push to Go Green through most or the whole state. The Garbage men dropped off 3 different bins that were labeled Paper, Plastic, and Aluminum. They were small and blue and could be stacked on top of each other. They didn't take up much space, but they didn't hold a lot either. Even though this was the first push to go green, it was still pretty tedious. My brothers and I would go outside and make sure that we had separated everything correctly according to the plastic numbers and whether it was paper or aluminum. This was fine in the begining but we soon we very upset when we had to continue to separate everything. So we began to throw everything together again.

Luckily, California and now Utah (kinda) have caught on to how inconvenient recycling used to be and now we can throw all our recycling into the one bin and the recycling plants separate the recyclables.

Recycling is now much more convenient.