We are building a new home again!!! This is the 3rd and I think we'll be in this one for the long haul. Hopefully the building bug wont bite us again and our grand children will be born here...:). Most of our freinds are not buying this though :).
The inspiration came from "Genine" and her architect husband, fueled with the desire to have a thoroughly green home for ourselves too. Some pictures of our earlier 2 homes below.
Some costings below if you are going solar in India: *Do note the costing could vary slightly depending on the vendor.
There are basically 2 options to choose from when going solar in your home:
1. Partly using solar to power a few commonly used lights and fans. Basically a 1KW system. This sytem would cost you about 2.25 lakh rupees but with a government subsidy of 30%, works out to about 1.5 lakhs.
2. Going solar for the full house. Your borewell motor could also run on this, depending on factors such as light/fan usage and borewell depth. With a little judicious use, the fridge could also be running on solar here. After the 30% rebate the 4.5 lakh costing works out to 3.2 lakhs. However do note that when running the motor, all the other electrical outlets to be plugged "off" or else the system could get overloaded. The best way would be to work out the watt usage and decide on how much is pushed onto the solar system.
Over and above this, the government also offers a soft loan at 5% interest. There usually is a 10 yr warranty on the panels, a 3 yr warranty on the battery and a 1 yr warranty on the overall system.
The battery operates at 90% efficiency and switches to the city grid once drained to below 40%.
An additional advantage is that the home owner can do away with another 50,000 Rs which is the cost of a 2KW UPS backup system as the solar batteries act like a backup UPS and always maintain a minimum 40% backup.
Will go on to some basic design guidelines to be kept in mind when including the solar infrastructure in homes in the next post.
Meanwhile for those of us who are enterprising and love DIY projects, here's an interesting DIY article on installing Solar, which is dank cheaper and possible for almost everyone as the components are ordered from eBay.
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