Self Powered

It's electric! do do do, and how ever that song goes on...

So one of my personal goals is to make my house self sufficient when it comes to electricity. I already know that it will require that I focus on more than one renewable source. Thus the main points at hand are solar, wind, water, storage, and cash.

I really don't like a windy day when it's cold out side. If I have a wind generator I'd probably be thinking differently. if you want to know how it works click here. One thing to definitely note is that if you're going to have a wind generator, use a spiral one. The standard wind generator is a big fan with a fin on the back to turn it which ever way the wind is blowing. With the spiral design, it doesn't have to adjust due to how the wind is blowing. Here is a picture one type of spiral design on the left. What also makes it great is that it will generate power even at low wind speeds. I'm not sure why large wind farms don't use these instead, maybe they cost more or can't make as much power at full capacity. If I find out I'll up date this.

Solar is pretty straight forward on how it works. I did find a couple of neat things going on with solar power. One is solar concentrators here are two site that can better tell you on the subject and also note I beleive these are two differnt concepts: one two. Here is another link to check out.

Water power is an old concept as well so I won't bore you with all that info. Here is an interesting youtube video about changing the way we do it:


Creating all of this power is great but what about down times? Storing the power is another issue as well, especially if you're off the grid. There are two options that I know of. The simplest is by making a battery bank, by using car batteries or something similar, and connect them together in a serial form. What that means is you connect them positive to negative which increases the voltage of the battery bank. How long it last would depend on the amps of the batteries and the power usage when the bank is not being charged. Also, if one of them die then you will have no power. Thus it might be a good idea to have a second battery bank or switch to bypass the bank. Another downside could be changing out the batteries when they are no longer good to use. How often would depend the battery you use. An alternative to the battery bank would be water. Yes water, all you got to do is separate the Oxygen from the hydrogen. Basically you have two wires in a container of water, one of the wires is positive and the other is negative, and you have two other containers, one above each wire end, to collect the oxygen and hydrogen. All you really want is the hydrogen. then when you need the power, you put the hydrogen into a generator and you got power. Now I'm not a chemist, but I would guess that you would not get all of the energy back from using the hydrogen storage method. Do be careful though since hydrogen plus oxygen plus energy could or will equal BOOM! If you are wanting to split water up I did run into this: Solar Cells Just scroll down till you see Solar cells. All it is about is using sun light to do the separating for you.

all of this stuff is great but it's not cheap either. I do think that if you do it right, it will be worth the long term investment and you might just make some money too!

Debt?

Don't buy stuff you can't afford!

A big problem with America is citizens today is getting into debt by buying things they can't afford.

Now I don't think that the consumer is entirely at fault here either. The media plays a key role by advertising commercials that make people think that they need this product for one reason or another. "Gotta have the new toy, car, technology, and etc..." It's ridiculous, because we truly don't need half of the stuff that advertised to us.

Truth of the matter is we need to learn how to budget and to not be afraid to be thrifty. I personally feel that public schools should teach students how to budget. I know that I still do not have a full sense of paying bills and trying to make sure that I am staying out of debt. I do my best to restrict myself from buying "stuff" when I have extra cash. Also, every time I get $1000 in my checking account, I move $500 to my savings. Sadly this has not happened yet since I have not been able to get to that amount, due to gas, car repairs, other needs, and a few wants. Yes I have bought stuff for myself from time to time. I might have to adjust that to a lower target amount so I'm actually putting money into my savings.

There are several things that are ok to go into debt for: education, car, and house. These are all investments for us individually. Education helps us get better jobs and thus (hopefully) make more money. A car, which loses value soon as you drive it off the lot, has become a need to get us from point A to point B. Also, the house which can be an investment for you since it's value is suppose to increase over time. Of course taking care of it and fixing it up over time helps too.

It seems to me that our country is now living on debt as it's life source. As of 10/22/2008, the total Public Debt Outstanding is......


drum roll please....


$10,495,669,391,439.70

Man I wonder how many times you could buy Disney, Microsoft, and Wal-mart with that much money. Of course that $700 billion stimulate for the economy only looks like a small dent in comparison.

To conclude on this: budget, don't be afraid to be thrifty, and avoid debt as much as possible. I know that these things won't solve everyone's financial problem, but we have more control over these areas than the others.

Next Blog... NOT SAFE!!!

This REALLY TICKED ME OFF!!!! I thought that since I might get into trying to use my Blog more, so I want to check out and see what other people put on they're blogs... guess what! PORN!!! why am I not surprised... I reported it and then I thought maybe it's just that one... flip through acouple... MORE PORN.... UGH!!!! The best part of all they tweak there code on their page so you don't see the header and you can't press the flag button. So I do not know if they will do anything about it or not but I hope so because there are kids on here too and people like me who don't want to see it! atleast have a freakin' warning page or something!!!! if you run into something like that here is a link to report that crap as well as some others too:

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Hi everyone and welcome to my Blog!!!

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-Stew