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The prudent use of passive solar energy can result in significant savings on your monthly power bill. Use our tips to direct the sun where you want it to be.

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Designing your solar Home to take advantage of the sun's energy can save you thousands of dollars in energy costs over the years.

When you think about living off the grid or solar power with connection to the grid, you have already made a basic decision to save planetary energy by using renewable energy resources. Off the grid means not being connected to a utility company that delivers electricity over a wide area which means you are self sufficient. But you could also use solar power and have a connection to a utility company.

To make it simple, a solar home has to be as efficient as it can be for things to work in a balanced manner. It should be built in a passive solar style. You probably live in a passive solar home right now and don’t even know it. Passive solar homes use a room or another part of the structure as a solar thermal energy collector, and in fact, your home’s windows, walls, and floors collect, store, and distribute solar energy every day. However, your home may not be very efficient at using the sun’s energy. Your house should be sealed and insulated top, bottom, and sides. A passive solar home has three times as many windows as a normal home. In your home you might have one room that gets toasty while another is chilly. That’s because the typical home isn’t designed to use solar energy to its advantage.

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Passive solar can be as simple as items that can be heated by the sun to produce energy

Active solar is when you use more expensive solar panels and the like to produce electricity to either charge batteries or to power items direct.

I think one of the oldest uses of passive solar is to face your home towards the south when building (in the U.S.) as this has been done for many years. This gives you the most sun for the most parts of the day.

Solar tubes and skylights and good insulated windows provide good lighting in the home for most of the daylight hours. My daughter's house has a skylight in an interior bath that you hardly ever need a light saving on electric. More of these in homes could be considerable savings.

Gardeners in this country and other countries have used the sun to dehydrate food at no energy cost once you build the initial equipment (and this is not expensive).

Gardeners have used greenhouses connected to their homes then the sun and plants heat the homes at no extra cost and with hours of enjoyment.

Collector panels at windows build up heat to be used in the home. These can be bought or built your self as plans can be easily found on the Internet.

Solar to heat water to run steam engines was popular at one time until a more reliable and cheaper source was found. But now with cost what they are this may return as a source of energy.

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Energy Tags: Passive solar

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Energy Tags: energy resources, battery technology

Since fossil fuels are slowly renewable, integration of passive solar design is a strategically correct long-term perspective, as due to heavy dependency on the resource its price over time will be increasing. For countries with limited initial sources of fossil fuels, this can be a too heavy economic burden to carry. When creating price scenarios for natural gas and crude oil, scientists use several variables. They include the current forward market for the product, current prices ion the market, external price forecasts, the historical trends. In such way, even if the growing demand for fossil fuels is ignored considering increasing scarcity of these resources, natural gas prices will reach $5.00 by 2015, $5.50 by 2025, and $7.50 by 2025.

It should be noted, that inflation is not considered in the price scenario, prices should be viewed in terms of current value per dollar. The current trend of technologies employed in passive solar design of building will be going the opposite direction, as a technological advance alongside with cost efficiency is predicted for solutions implemented in solar design as demand for them will be increasing. In such way, passive solar design of buildings is cost efficient in the long run especially for countries with limited crude oil and natural gas resources, as the dependency of these countries on foreign oil and gas will only be increasing alongside with the price per gallon. Integration of passive solar design makes houses more affordable, comfortable, and energy-efficient.

Implementation of passive solar design solutions is cost efficient, minimizes energy consumption and dependency on renewable sources of energy, is environmentally clean, and can be easily implemented at any geographic location. Practical implementation of the solutions also proved to be effective. Going even further then this, in the light of limited resources, implementation of passive solar design solutions is a step forward towards a greater level of efficiency and economic freedom in the future. As such, it is my firm belief that passive solar design is one of the most efficient ways to minimize energy consumption at any geographic location.

Jennifer Burns

Jennifer Burns is a professional freelance academic writer at Custom-Writing.org, research paper service. Jennifer specializes in movie critique and <a href='http://custom-writing.org/dissertation-writing' target='_blank&#