A Word about Efficiency

When building any system, efficiency is a concern.  With solar power, it can be a deciding factor in several decisions.

Immediately, you will begin to see that low efficiency gets costly and it starts right out of the gate.

If a system delivers 100KWh/day of energy, and it has a 50% efficiency, it means the system must actually produce 200 KWh/day to deliver 100 KWh/day.  

It gets worse.  That extra 100 KWh/day of energy goes somewhere!  It is often lost in the form of heat.  Heat in turn has to be neutralized in some way, or strategically positioned so that it does not impact the user.

For this reason, the inefficient components need to be placed in areas where the heat is not going to impact the users negatively. Better yet, if we could find a way to harness and use that heat, we would increase the overall efficiency of our lives.

For now, we will treat inefficiency as the enemy and do our best to make the system as efficient as possible.

It is important to remember that a portion of heat created by power-generation and conditioning is not realized by the homeowner since that heat is dissipated at the power plant, or along the transmission lines etc.  Just keep in mind that with a solar energy system, most of that heat is now being generated on your property and needs to be considered in system design.

Generally, the more power something exerts, the more energy is lost in the form of heat.  Sometimes it is not avoidable, though.  We will try to keep parts of the system from doing a lot of work, but when its required, we will try to keep the power needed to do the work at a minimum.  This will be mentioned throughout the project.