The NE is no stranger to emergency power blackouts, especially this year. Normally utility power will go down during storms a couple of times a year but recently, it is a all too common fact of life. Long ago we bought a noisy portable gas generator to keep our refrigerator cold and run our well and sump pumps during an outage. We even put in a transfer switch to run those circuits in the house to make things easier. Recently we started looking at home solar generators to replace our noisy gas generator.

During Hurricane Irene we were out of power for four days and since we were away the first two days of the storm we lost most of the refrigerated items. Some of our neighbors have propane gas powered whole-house generators that come on automatically. They are noisy too. Continue reading …

The practical application of solar thermal was first introduced by the Swiss in 1767, but heating water with a patented solar water heating collector did not happen until 1891 in America. The man largely given credit for this countries popular residential application of solar thermal was Clarence Kemp who invented a solar collector and sold it through his Baltimore appliance factory outlet. Continue reading …

While escaping to the coast to a friends house in a secluded area near the Pacific, I was amazed to see how low her gas bill was. Why? She has a hot tub as well as a small lap pool that my friend keep very warm. On the hot tub, pool and her home she had installed solar thermal collectors.

When I saw how much hot water my friend was producing with such a low gas bill, I became a believer. Continue reading …

As a renewable energy group that is immersed into the solar world, most of us spends some part of every day scanning news headlines that float past in cyberspace. I don’t know why, but it blows me away when I read a post or new solar product with a Google key word term intentionally designed to game the system and deceive browsers. Continue reading …