Being green, what do those two little words mean to you?  Perhaps it means buying local produce, walking more & driving less, installing low energy lighting, buying a BioDiesel car? I think its all these things and many more besides.  Bit by bit we should be educating ourselves and passing on those Eco-Tips  to our friends.

For me, it all started in early 2007 when I came across a previously aired (2006) UK television series called It's Not Easy Being Green. Take an average, well fairly average British family who have collectively decided to give up their comfortable suburban lifestyle and try a new and more responsible existence.  They buy a run down farmhouse and set about learning how to harness the elements. We sat and watched the episodes back to back, clearly a combination of envy and admiration. They produced a great and informative book to accompany the series. Link

Amazing how a mere TV show could have had such an effect on this household.  We earnestly started composting and recycling, switched out all the bulbs for low-voltage variants.  Boiled less water in the kettle for our coffee, turned off light bulbs in empty rooms and bought a Kill-A-Watt to ensure nothing on standby was sucking a lot of energy. We bought ecology books, started seeking out any TV shows with a green angle, and with each show we learned a little more and realized that we actually really knew very little on the subject, but learning can be fun, right kids?

This story totally floored me.  A young man with ingenuity and that can-do attitude builds a wind turbine using bits that most of us would think of as junk.  He succeeds and produces a wonderful blog about it.  Quite puts me to shame. Link

Take the already cool Toyota Prius and add solar panels and additional batteries, sweet.  I drove a regular Prius in the UK last month and loved it, if I hadn't just bought a new car, I'd be getting a solar equipped Prius tomorrow.  I left the lights on my Prius overnight and it flattened the batteries, nothing so unusual there though you'd think Toyota would have covered such eventualities, apparently not.  I called out the Automobile Association, their mechanic couldn't find the battery or a charging point and had to call in for assistance.  This struck me as amusing seeing as the car is one gigantic battery!  So on to the Solar Prius.  Link

Last weekend we decided to dabble in solar power, mainly to discover the components and how much actual usable energy one could extract out of a low-end system.  Harbor Freight has a 45 Watt system currently on offer or a mere $199.  You get three 15 Watt panels and a metal floor stand, a rather nicely equipped charge controller, two 12 Volt compact fluorescent light bulbs, the required leads.  You just need to add a deep cycle battery and some sun.  The kit is featured here. Link

The basic components I now know are as follows:

SOLAR PANEL - CHARGE CONTROLLER - BATTERY - INVERTER.  Sunlight in one end and 115 Volts AC out the other.

It all went together well and within 20 minutes we were generating somewhat pathetic amounts of electricity, why?  Those panels are only 15 Watts each which gives us a grand total of 45 Watts.  A single good quality panel which would take up slightly less room would provide 80+ Watts.  Pay a more still ($1K+) and get a panel that does over 100 Watts.  Six of these panels in a row on your roof and on a sunny day you can be pulling down a very usable 600 Watts peak.

As the smallest member of our happy household loves to play her Roland X6 synthesizer (mostly in piano mode) we thought it would be cool to wire in a dedicated loop from the 400w inverter to where the synth resides.  Solar Synth!  If we get a power cut, we can sit in darkness while she serenades us with music!

The three solar panels currently reside on the deck, but that takes up room and Bowlie our dog will probably start peeing all over them soon.  So, I decided to mount them on the roof of the wooden dog house, perfect!  I'll post a picture when the project is done.

Voila!  As you might have gathered, I have all the active electronics and the battery in the house, currently in the basement.