Solar Powered Flood Lights

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Jan

Maybe too much for your home? Picture by Steve A Johnson via Flickr

Hey there and welcome to this little guide about solar powered flood lights.

There are many solar-powered devices around these days and while many of these appliances aren’t really efficient, solar power can show all its strength when it comes to floodlights. In combination with energy efficient lighting and good batteries, solar power can deliver all the electricity needed to light your house and your garden.

You won’t need electricity from the grid anymore and do something for our environment. Besides that, you can easily save money with solar powered flood lights. Save electricity at home by replacing your old flood lights or install a new set of solar flood lights outdoor, without worrying about the electricity consumption.

So let’s start with common places where solar flood lights can be used efficiently.

Where To Install Solar Powered Flood Lights?

Basically a solar power light can be used at two locations:

To light the exterior of your house and to illuminate your garden. Starting with the first point you can let your house shine in the right light, illuminate entrances and use floodlights very decoratively. Just a few well-placed spotlights can give your home a whole new touch at night.

While decorative lighting is pretty nice, in my opinion, flood lights should also be used in a more applicatory sense. Security is a big concern in many areas and just one or two floodlights in the right spot can make your home a lot more saver.

Intruders are discouraged by light and motion activated lights or light-sensitive appliances are perfectly suitable for this purpose. Place some flood lights with motion detectors at your entrances and at corners around your home and thieves will leave your house when they face the sudden light.

Another great place for a floodlight is your garage door. Use a motion sensor and light your way when you come home.

The other application which I like to stress here is to use solar flood lights outdoor. For example, you can use them to illuminate ways and paths around your home and in the garden. My recommendations for these areas are light-sensitive lights which turn on automatically when it gets dark.

You can also use solar powered landscape lighting to give your garden a whole new feeling at night. Illuminate some trees or give a great spa-feeling to your pool area. Everything is possible, so be creative and get the most out of sour garden.

Why Solar Flood Lights?

Well, flood lights are a security enhancement to your home and can be a really nice addition to your garden, but why should you go solar with your lighting?

Environmental Impact: Yes, you actively do your part for a better future with solar flood lights. Save electricity, lower your carbon footprint and be part of the green movement.
Save Money On Electricity: Even better, you can save money with solar lights because you won’t need any power from the grid at all with the right lights (obviously, you need to love at a location with sunshine).
No Extensive Wiring: If you think about illuminating your home and your garden in the past, you had to think about wiring all these lights. Obviously, this is both a daunting task and costs a lot of money. Solar flood lights are free of cables, which is one big point in our next advantage…
Easy To Install: Outdoor solar flood lights are very easy to install! In most cases, you just have to mount the light somewhere and make sure that it points in the right direction.

Light Sensitive Flood Lights Vs. Motion Activated Flood Lights

Solar flood lights make the most sense when you combine them with a light-sensitive photo cell or with motion sensor. Both technologies make sure that you don’t have to switch your lights on and off by hand. However, it’s important to think about which technology you need before buying your lights.

Motion activated solar light are especially useful for security applications. Use them around your home and at your walls to make your house safer. Special places that I like to mention are all kinds of entrances, including your garage and ways to your doors.

When you have a path in the garden that you don’t use regularly, you can illuminate it with a motion activated flood light. This way, your light won’t turn on every night, and you can raise its lifetime.

Adding "Touch" with a single flood light Picture by goforchris via Flickr

Light sensitive solar lights are most applicable to decorative purposes in the garden. In addition to the places mentioned above you can place some lights in your trees to create a great atmosphere outside. Another common place for a flood light is the number of your house. Light it with a small spotlight to make it visible in the dark. Do you own a pool? Try to illuminate it with flood lights, possibly under water, to create stunning spa-like effects.

Types Of Solar Powered Flood Lights And Points To Be Aware Of

The market offers quite an array of solar lights these days, and it isn’t always easy to decide which one to buy for your purpose. I just can give you some recommendations in this post. Let’s have a look at the lighting technique first.

Solar lights are dependent off the solar radiation at your location and the battery that is used to store the solar generated electricity. Obviously, you want to go for energy efficient lighting to get the most out of the solar energy.

Type Of Bulbs: Well, the most efficient lighting these days comes from LEDs, so I recommend that you try to get flood lights with this technology. LED lights have the lowest electricity demand and the highest lifetime of all lights. In my opinion, these advantages can outweigh the slightly higher installation costs for your flood lights by far.
Light output of flood lights. The light output is measured in lumen and can reach several thousand Lumens for flood lights. Make sure that you have enough output for your application.
The lighting angle – measured in degrees. It describes the width of your light, the bigger the lighting angle, the wider will the light be spread.
Light color temperature: Most producers offer solar flood lights with a warm or a cold white light. For landscape lighting, you can even buy lights with all kinds of color temperatures.

LED Replacement Bulbs

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Jan

: Picture by Lomo-Cam via Flickr

There has been huge developments in energy efficient lighting. While the last century was completely dominated by incandescent light bulbs, today we are aware of all the disadvantages of this lighting. We made it through halogen lights and compact fluorescent lights to end up with light-emitting diodes or LEDs. At least up to date, LED Replacement Bulbs unite all the benefits we need. They are highly efficient, durable and produce very little heat. The only drawback is the comparable high cost for LED replacement bulbs.

However, don’t worry: Read my post about energy efficient lighting to see that in the end, they are nevertheless the cheapest lighting. Unfortunately almost all of us have their whole home equipped with the old-fashioned tungsten bulbs.

So where can you use LED replacement bulbs?

Basically everywhere! As LED replacement bulbs have a conventional lamp socket, they will fit in all your old sockets in your house, the garden and in the car. However, that doesn’t mean that LEDs are useful for every purpose. The limiting point is the color rendering index (CRI) which leads us to the different light features and their meaning for light-emitting diodes.

Important Characteristics of LED Lights

When you want to replace your old bulbs with LEDs, you need to consider some facts before you buy anything. Here is just a short list of the most important characteristics of LED lights. You will find these values on the packaging of your new lights and on the data sheet of the producer. Read my article about light color temperature to find a description and some background info on these points.

Luminous efficiency

The luminous efficiency of common LEDs is the best of all lamps you can get at the moment.

Lifetime

Another winner for the LEDs. With an average lifespan of 50.000 hours, light-emitting diodes are unbeatable at the moment.

Light Color Temperature / Color Rendering Index

Good and versatile, but not as good as incandescent lights. The color temperature and the CRI are measures for the characteristic light of a lamp. While LEDs are available in different color temperatures (cold white, warm white, etc.), at least at the moment they can’t reach the CRI of incandescent light sources meaning the light output of LEDs is not as natural as the light of classic lights (in easy words).

Heat Output

Very low, far better than incandescent, halogen and compact fluorescent lights.

Vulnerability to Shaking

Again, better than the competition.

Eco-friendly Materials

In between tungsten lights and compact fluorescent lights. LEDs contain no toxic materials like CFLs, but they need to be recycled like all other electric devices.
Sensitivity to cycling (On/Off Switching)
Very good. Out of competition.

Where To Use LED Lights And Where to Avoid Them

As you can see, LED replacement bulbs perform pretty good in most of the points. The only real drawback is the bad CRI. Obviously, this leads to some problems where LEDs are not useful. Here’s a list of common places where LED lights should be avoided.

Avoid
All places where a very high light quality with a high CRI is needed.

Showrooms
Lighting for Paintings and Pictures
Big rooms that need extensive area lighting.

LED Lights for Cars

First of all, forget about replacing your headlights with LED lights. While there are some premium cars that are equipped with LEDs, there are no LED replacement lights for standard bulbs today.

Where LEDs can really shine are all other lights on your car – inside and outside. Most commonly they are used to light the inside of a car and the license plates. All benefits of LEDs apply to cars. In general, they are much brighter than the standard lights, they have a longer lifetime, generate a more natural light and need less power.

Make sure that your new lights fit in your car’s applications perfectly. Furthermore, it is reported that some LED lamps didn’t work as good as the factory lighting if they are covered by colored lenses.

Prices for good sets of LEDs are around US$ 10. Although the electricity saving potential for LEDs in cars might be not as high as it is in the house, the other advantages are well worth considering.

LED Lights for Home

Often coming in the design and shape of classic incandescent lights, LED lights can reach their full saving potential in the house. Read my article about energy efficient lighting to see how much you can really save with LEDs at home, and how short the payback times can be.

While the market features some pretty nice toys like color changing LEDs, I can just speak of standard replacement bulbs here. Have a look at the points described above to find the right LED for your application and taste.

Prices starting at around 10 dollars for standard LED bulbs.

Save Electricity Poster

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Jan

Hey Fellow Readers, Jan Here!

Here’s a simple but cool “save electricity poster” for all of you! Fell free to download and print it. The native resolution is A2 which should be big enough for a full-sized poster. For the best image quality, run to the next print shop and let they do the work.

Why this save electricity poster?

Well, not all of us are conscious about our energy consumption. I thought it might be a cool idea to print out a little poster to remind myself and everyone around of the importance of save electricity at home.

Print this poster and pin it at:

Your own house to remind yourself!
Your working place to remind your colleagues!
Your school to remind your classmates!
Your university to remind your fellow students!
Your children room to remind your kids!

We need to be conscious of our energy consumption, everyday!

Have Fun!

Click (.png)

Click (.jpg)

Energy Saving Power Strips – Saving Potential

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Jan

Picture: IntangibleArts via Flickr

While many of us know that devices draw power in standby mode, most of us think it’s marginal and ignore this fact.

Let me tell you one thing: Most likely, your phantom load is higher than you think!

How many times do you switch off your devices completely? I almost never did it because I thought it wasn’t worth the little effort.

I was wrong! In the end, I was able to almost eliminate the standby loads in my home, and my electricity bill was reduced by 7-8%. Don’t underestimate these values. Let’s pay 1.000 dollars for your yearly electricity bill.

Now that’s US$70 to US$80 saved!

Common Standby Loads

Most of our modern electrical appliances draw some power of the net when they are in standby mode.

While all sorts of functions use power in standby mode, most of these are not needed. To find out how much electricity an application is using in sleep mode, you can simply have a look at the technical specifications.

To be sure, that the given values are right, you can use a simple watt-meter to determine the phantom load by yourself.

Reducing Phantom Loads

Basically, there are three ways to lower your electricity consumption by standby loads:

Unplug your devices
Yep, that’s still the easiest method to eliminate the standby consumption of appliances. While it’s not the most handy, and for sure not the most elegant method, it’s simple, save and cheap because you don’t have to invest money in new power strips. If you are comfortable with plugging all your devices off every time you don’t need them, you won’t need any energy saving power strips.

Switchable Power Strips
We all know those good old power strips that are equipped with a switch to power all attached devices off. They are for sure more practical than the “pull the plug method”, but you still have to switch them off by hand. The only real advantage they have is the price. While they are pretty cheap, I recommend to spend some more bucks to get a high-quality power strip with a surge protector.

Energy Saving Power Strips
The whole point of energy saving power strips is their ability to switch off automatically when the attached device(s) are in standby mode. This way, you don’t have to switch them off by hand, and your appliances can’t draw phantom power from the net.

Types of energy saving powerstrips:

Strips with a master outlet: These strips switch all outlets of, if the master outlet is not in use. For example, you can plug your TV into the master outlet. If you switch off the television, your whole entertainment system with receiver, hi-fi, dvd-player and game console will be turned down, and all outlets are completely switched off.

Strips with a standby sensor: These switch outlets off independently, if the current at an outlet is below a threshold that indicates that the attached appliance is in standby mode.

Strips with a timer: These power strips are programmable and will switch off after the programmed time is over.

Which Power Strip Should you Use?

With the big selection of different types of energy-saving power strips, it’s not obvious which one you should buy for your appliances. I summarized the beast choices in a little table.

RecommendPower Strips for Different Applications

Saving Potential

Let’s assume that you’re appliances are draining 80 dollars per year in standby load. High quality energy saving power strips cost around US$ 35 at the time of writing, and you will need a set of them to equip your whole home.
Let’s say you pay US$ 120 to save 80% of the idle loads.

80% of $80 = $64 saved per year!

In this example, you will break even in less than two years!

So let’s give it a little room. Maybe it will take 5 years for your investment to pay off, but you will still save some good money in the end.

Conclusion

Energy saving power strips can really help you to reduce the phantom loads from your appliances. Payback times off 2-5 years are perfectly realistic. However, the results are also achievable with switchable power strips. If you are comfortable with switching off your devices constantly, you can take a cheap power strip with a switch and lower the payback times even more.

How Is Geothermal Energy Produced?

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Jan

Geothermal Spring in the Yellowstone National Park, picture by Alan Vernon via Flickr

How is Geothermal Energy Produced in the Earth?

The concept of geothermal energy uses the heat of the earth to generate energy.

The heat is either used directly for heating and cooling purposes, or it drives generators to produce electricity. As all renewable energies, it is eco-friendly and independent of limited resources like coal, gas or oil. The only resource it needs is the earth’s heat, which is a result of the evolution of the earth and of the radioactive decay of elements.

The earth, which is made of the core, the mantle and the crust has a temperature gradient meaning that the temperatures get higher to the core. The higher the geothermal gradient, the higher the efficiency of geothermal energy.

This is the reason why geothermal power is widely used in island, which is located at an active plate boundary and hence has generally a high gradient. Today Island is generating around 25% of their electricity from geothermal plants.

Just like a hot ball of magma the earth is cooling down and losing heat since it’s accumulation. The heat is transported from the core to the crust. Obviously, the crust on top of the ball is the coolest part. If you drill a hole into the crust, it gets hotter and hotter and this is exactly the source of geothermal energy.

How do We Use Geothermal Energy?

As said before there are basically two methods.

Geothermal Heating

The first method is called geothermal heating and it uses the heat directly to raise or lower the temperature in a building or for technical purposes. Let’s have a look at a simple residential geothermal system.

The basic components are pretty simple.

Depending on the geothermal gradient a hole is drilled. Now a tube is installed in this hole, which funnels the cold water down. The water gets heated from the natural heat in the earth crust and is funneled up to the building where it is used in the heater.

Temperatures of 60°C are perfectly achievable, without the need of any hydrocarbon resources. Obviously, you need electricity to power the pumps but the generated energy outperforms this pretty well.

Geothermal Electricity

The other method is called geothermal electricity.

Basically, the heated water coming from the bore hole is used to power a turbine which generates electricity. Geothermal electricity is used on larger scales than geothermal heating and more and more geothermal power plants get build.

To maximise the efficiency, the boreholes of geothermal power plants are deeper than the holes of residential geothermal kits. In general, the tubes are up to 3 km deep.

The Future of Geothermal Energy

Now that we know who thermal energy works, what’s the future of geothermal energy?

In my opinion it’s even more suited to power wide areas than solar power because it’s independent of solar irradiance and weather variations.

With rising efficiencies and falling costs the heat of the earth can play a major role on our way to sustainable, green energies.

I guess the combination of residential and industrial solar systems in sunny locations and the use of geothermal power at locations with a high gradient could be quite a powerful concept to solve many of our energy problems.

Green Potential

Saving Money With Green Living