Solar Power & Energy

Overview
Solar furnaces aren’t quite as robust and large as conventional home furnace systems are. Solar heaters are usually space heating designs, which heat a room or space in a home instead of the entire house at once.

Conventional Furnace
To use a conventional whole house furnace with solar power, you’d need to buy a solar panel power generating kit and connect it to an electric furnace. Then you’d be using solar power to run the furnace instead of using standard household electricity.

Running a whole house electric furnace on solar power could be expensive however, depending upon how large your furnace is and how much power it needs. Home furnaces tend to use a lot of electricity, and the more your furnace needs to be on the more solar power you’ll need to be able to collect for it.

Determining how much electricity your furnace needs is a simple math equation: The number of …

I just bought the Sunforce 60 Watt Solar Panel Generator Kit from Amazon. It arrived here on Tuesday afternoon and I was very happy with most of the packaging.

This kit has had both good and bad reviews through Amazon in the last 18 months or so - for various reasons too and I’ll get into those. The kit is super cheap compared to most solar panels and solar power kits on the market right now though, so I thought I’d try it out as a starter system.

First of all, this solar power kit is made with older technology and cheap parts. It’s actually made in China, so there have been some quality issues for other buyers. I knew going into the deal that I wouldn’t be getting top of the line solar …

These are some of the initial photos and notes from my first attempts at solar cooking…

I’m using a 6 quart cast iron dutch oven camp stove.

I love cast iron because it heats up so easily, heats uniformly, and stays hot for much longer periods of time. I figured using cast iron would help absorb the solar heat from the sun even on partly cloudy days, and since the pot retains heat so well, it seems to help quite a bit on windy days too.

I love cast iron because it heats up so easily, heats uniformly, and stays hot for much longer periods of time. I figured using cast iron would help absorb the solar heat from the sun even on partly cloudly days, and since …