Convert to Solar Power in 4 Easy Steps

Electrician Brisbane Southside maintain their good reputation over the years so we also reward them with their good service. For many, the desire to convert to solar power is there. With monthly power bills increasing year-over-year and our lifestyles being tied to that power supply coming into our home, many feel as though they are slaves to the power companies. It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, with the current state of solar technology, converting to solar power is easier now than it ever has been before.

Of course the easiest way to convert to solar energy is to hire a professional. But, it’s also the most expensive. The least expensive way to make use of solar energy is by building the solar panels yourself.

By choosing to build your own solar power system, the costs of this renewable energy source are greatly reduced, and it makes it simple for anyone to convert to solar power. With four easy steps you can be on your way to making use of Green Energy, and if you build your solar power system correctly its life expectancy is 30 to 40 years.

Step 1 – Reduce Your Energy Requirements

Before making the decision to convert to solar power it is suggested that you first work to reduce your energy requirements. The less power you need to keep your home running, the lower your initial installation costs will be. There are many simple ways to reduce the amount of electricity you use.

For example switching to LCD lighting could reduce the amount of electricity required to light your home. A 100 Watt incandescent bulb uses 100 Watts of electricity per hour. On the other hand a 3.5 Watt LCD bulb will produce the same amount of light.

There are other simple things you can do as well. Adding in a solar water heater to your current electric hot water heater can reduce the amount of power needed to heat the water for your home. Changing that 10 year old fridge or dishwasher for newer, more energy efficient models, is also a simple way to lower your power requirements.

Simply taking a few steps ahead of time may cut your power needs by as much as 50%.

Step 2 – Decide on How Much Power You Need

After working to reduce the amount of power you need, it’s time to calculate how much electricity you do need. This step actually isn’t that difficult. Simply look at every item in your home that uses electricity. Take the wattage ratings from each appliance and light, and then multiply it by the number of hours it runs each day.

For example, a fridge that requires 400Watts of power will run for about 8 hours (about 1/3 of the time) a day. This appliance uses 400 x 8 = 3200 Watt Hours of electricity every day. That 3.5 Watt LCD bulb that you run for 4 hours each night uses 3.5 x 4 = 14 Watt Hours of electricity every day. If an appliance doesn’t have a wattage rating on its label, you can get the watts needed using OHM’s law; P=E*I (Watts = Voltage x Amps).

Create a list and repeat this step for every item in your home that uses electricity.

Step 3 – Build Your Solar Power System

Once you know how many watt hours of electricity you use each day it’s time to build your solar panels, and convert your home. If in step 2 you determined that you need 10000 Watt Hours (10 kilo-Watt Hours) of electricity, then you need to build enough solar panels to suit.

Assuming that the sun shines for 8 hours of the day, it would take about 13, 100 Watt solar panels to produce that much energy. Building the solar panels yourself is the least expensive solution. According to Science Daily, a 100 Watt solar panel cost $1150 on average in 2008. You can build that same panel yourself for around $150.

In this step there may be other considerations. For a grid-intertied solution, where you also have power from the grid, building 13 panels and having them wired to power your home directly is a suitable solution. When the sun shines you’ll be running your home off solar energy alone, and when it doesn’t, any additional electricity needs are taken care of by the power grid.

Where things get more complicated is when you want to go off-grid, or when you want to add a battery backup to your system. In this case you should consult with a DIY solar power guide. These guides include the information needed to make these additional calculations.

Step 4 – Have an Electrician Inspect and Wire it into Your Home

Whether you buy your solar panels or build them yourself, you should have a qualified electrician do the final wiring into your home. This may cost you a few dollars extra, but in some places it’s the law, and even if it isn’t an electrician is qualified to deal with the 240Volt wires coming into your home.

There is a definite danger doing this step yourself. Also, if you did build your own solar power system, the electrician will be able to do a final inspection to ensure all of your wiring is up to code.

After you have your system wired into your home, you’re now finished with your conversion to solar power. With just basic maintenance you can expect to enjoy renewable energy, and cheaper power bills, for years to come.

John O’ryan works as a builder/installer of Solar Power solutions. He also runs a site that helps others choose the right solutions to go green and save. You can read more about how to convert to solar or wind power on his solar and wind power blog.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/John_O’ryan/433494

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Exercises to Lose Weight – Easy, Effortless and Fun

Reformer pilates Manly can help you tone your arms, legs and core whilst improving posture and flexibility. Walking is the best known exercise that requires the least amount of effort but there is yet another fun and easy to do activity that is much less talked about. The benefits it brings are huge, from eliminating undue stress and strengthening every cell in the body to shedding unwanted fat and weight.

This activity is a dream come true for all of us who struggle with lack of time to travel to a gym, lack of space to devote to complex and bulky fitness machines and quite frankly for those of us without the willingness to exert our bodies with strenuous movements.

A healthy diet will always be a must for a sustained weight loss and balanced diet menu should be a goal to achieve for any athlete. But whether you are an athlete needing to keep your body strong or a person who wants to lose weight or maintain it,  there is a great exercise which will benefit everybody. 

It requires a small tool or equipment which is generally known as mini trampoline, the proper name of which is a rebounder.  This tool is generally considered a fun devise for kids to jump on. Not everybody would think of it as being a very useful, easy to use and fun thing that it really is. Before you dismiss it out of your mind and start looking for something else, please consider reading on until the end of this short article.

If rebounder exercise was a little more complicated or caused more discomfort it would probably be more popular. In a world of torturing, time consuming exercise programs the simplicity of the physical requirements you need to keep in shape will shock you. Good benefits can be derived even by doing nothing but sitting on the rebounder while another person is jumping on it. This is very useful for incapacitated people to get their work out just by being present.

For healthy people the ease of obtaining huge exercise benefits by doing next to nothing is stunning. Just by gently rocking up and down on the rebounder mat, without your feet ever leaving the mat surface, every muscle and every cell in your body will receive exercise which will benefit and strengthen them. This is very exciting and significant. Instinctively and intuitively children know this without realizing it. They love to jump on a sofa or a bed just for fun.

What is the great benefit of this kind of rebounding exercise? While vertically moving up and down there are three forces at play exerting pressure on every muscle and cell in our body and thus exercising them. These forces are: the force of gravity, the force of acceleration  and the force of deceleration. The common denominator of all exercises is opposition to the gravitational pull of the earth.

On a rebounder when moving up and down the 1G force which is there by just standing still will be increased by adding acceleration as you move up and by adding deceleration at the bottom of the bounce. Even if your feet never leave the mat as you gently rock up and down the G force will thus be increased by 25 per cent. When you get beyond this incredibly gentle and effortless exercise and allow your feet to leave the mat the G force increase that your body will be exercised with will go up markedly.

Bouncing on a rebounder stresses and thus exercises every cell over and over about one hundred times per minute. Every cell will begin to adjust to a greater G force and in that manner will become stronger. You may ask yourself why oppose gravity and thus exercise with only one part of your body, which happens when you do push ups, pull ups, leg lifts and so on, when you are able to oppose gravity increased by acceleration and deceleration with every part of your body.

You can exercise every part of your body simply by using a rebounder. To start with it won’t feel like exercise at all. It is great fun to do while listening to music. Do it just for the length of one song and you’ll benefit immensely already. Start slow and with short time intervals. Gradually increase the time and jump height as you get stronger. Effortless exercise can be yours and you will have a rebounder exercise fun.

Vance Sova http://healthydietweightloss.org/

There is a never ending quest for health and a simple and true path to it. There are many questions we have and even more conflicting answers. The growing numbers of people with a weight problem is alarming. Find an open-minded approach to finding solutions regarding healthy diet, exercise, weight loss and anything that may help you keep in good shape and health. Sometimes even one point we overlooked for a long time may improve our condition when implemented.

Visit my website http://healthydietweightloss.org/ for more information.

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What is Waste Disposal?

Every country want to achieve a zero waste, some says recycling could be the answer but no, waste disposal Sydney team can handle that. Be it used plastic bag, broken glass, obsolete cell phone, or used battery cells, they are all used products that require appropriate disposal to limit their harm to the environment. Waste disposal is therefore a systematic action for managing waste from its origin to its final disposal. It includes incineration/burning, burial at landfill sites or discharge at sea/lake/river, and recycling.

WordWeb defines waste disposal as a “unit for getting rid of and destroying or storing used, damaged or other unwanted industrial, agricultural or domestic products and substances.” It also entails proper discard or discharge of the material waste in accordance with the local environmental regulatory framework. Because waste disposal involves a myriad of processes such as collection, transportation, dumping, recycling, or sewage treatment among other waste product monitoring and regulation measures, there are lots of problems associated with waste disposal. Here are the common waste disposal problems and their solutions.

Various Waste Disposal Problems

  1. Production of too much waste

One of the major waste disposal problems is attributed to the generation of too much waste. America alone is responsible for the producing of about 220 million tons of waste annually. In 2007 for instance, it’s recorded that Americans generated nearly 260 million tons of municipal solid waste. This is about 2.1 kg per person each day. The point is; if these are only figures in America, let’s try to imagine the amount of waste produced by the rest of the population across the globe.

According to the World Bank report, the average global municipal solid waste (MSW) generation per person on daily basis is about 1.2 kg and the figure is expected to rise up to 1.5 kg by 2025. It therefore means that every state and local authority suffer the problem of effective waste disposal due to the generation of too much waste. The problem is that the present era is driven by a throw-away consumerism with companies and producers striving to maximize profits by producing one-time use products without prioritizing on reuse, recycling or the use of environmentally friendly materials.

  1. Most of the waste is toxic

The majority of the state and local authority legislations are generally lax on regulating the ever-expanding manufacturing industries. On a daily basis, these industries produce toxic products that end up getting thrown away after use. Most of the products contain hazardous and health-threatening chemicals.

A report by the U.S. EPA indicates that more than 60,000 untested chemicals are present in the consumer products in our homes. There are even products known to contain toxic chemicals, such as Biphenyl-A (BPA) – often present in plastic toys, but they are still poorly regulated. Packaging is also one of the biggest and rapidly enlarging categories of solid waste which accounts for 30% of MSW and approximately 40% of the waste is plastic which is never biodegradable. It’s this level of toxicity together with the lax regulatory laws that exacerbates the problem of dealing with waste disposal.

  1. Landfills are a problem as well

Most landfills lack proper on-site waste management thereby contributing to additional threats to the environment. In the long-term, landfills leak and pollute ground water and other neighboring environmental habitats making waste management very difficult. They also give off potentially unsafe gases.

Also, the laws and regulation guiding the operations of landfills are often lax at monitoring and regulating the different types of wastes namely medical waste, municipal waste, special waste or hazardous waste. With this kind of laxity of the laws in landfill waste management, the landfills toxicity and hazardous nature significantly increases to a point where the landfill waste problems often lasts for up to 30 years.

  1. Regulations are based on vested interests

Since waste disposal and management has become a profit making venture, those who advocate for safe, quality and proper management of waste disposal are outmatched by industries in the business. Large enterprises in the waste disposal business dictate all aspects of the market from operating landfills, sewer systems and incinerators to recycling facilities. The corporations simply aim at making profits regardless of the waste reduction requirements or the resultant destructive environment impacts.

As such, they collaborate with vested interest regulators thereby creating a big problem in the effective regulation of waste disposal, which has worsened the devotions to waste reduction and recycling programs. To make matters worse, even some state officials work together with such industry officials to expand landfills, increase waste tonnage, and develop new waste disposal or recycling or treatment facilities to augment profits.

  1. Reliance of dying technologies to reduce and recycle waste

Waste disposal and management facilities as well as state resources have continued to rely on myopic and quickie solutions instead of developing effective recycling and waste reduction programs. Consequently, it has created continued reliance on the use of outdated technologies to deal with waste disposal. The problem is that most states are reluctant and less creative towards advancing novel technologies for reducing the toxicity and volume of waste or enhancing recycling, especially solid waste.

  1. Some of the technologies marked as “green” are not true in actual sense

Recycling technologies such as plasma arc, gasification, and pyrolysis are often marked as “green” but the truth of the matter is that they are not 100% green. These recycling technologies burn up waste with little or no oxygen and for this reason; it doesn’t differentiate them from the traditional incinerators which produce energy from burning waste.

As much as burning waste to produce energy is considered green because it does not involve the use fossil fuel, it still releases toxic materials into the environment. Also like the traditional waste incineration systems, these technologies emit toxic ash into the atmosphere that can potentially harm people’s health and the environment. Therefore, the technologies simply divert concentration from the development of cleaner recycling and waste reduction technologies.

Waste Disposal Solutions

Eco-responsibility – “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle”

Eco-responsibility pertains to the three Rs mantra of Re-use, Reduce, and Recycle. Local communities, authorities and states need to put more efforts towards the education of waste management. Essentially, the slogan can help reduce the levels of unsustainable waste that prove problematic in various environments across the globe. With the implementation and consistent practice of the three Rs, communities and local authorities as well as states will not only be able to manage waste but also move in the direction of achieving zero waste.

More emphasis should be placed on responsible resource use with an objective of avoidance, maximizing recycling and waste reduction methods. Avoidance and waste reduction involves techniques such as repair of broken things instead of buying new, purchasing and re-using second-hand items, and designing reusable and recyclable products.

Effective waste disposal and management

An effective strategy for municipal waste disposal and management can offer improved solutions for the various problems associated with waste materials. It ensures there is gradual improvement of new and cost-effective facilities which aim to encourage higher environmental protection standards. An effective management strategy will also see to it that landfills are purposefully located to ease waste collection, transfer, and monitoring or recycling. This can be achieved through the implementation of waste disposal plan which must include proper monitoring and regulation of municipal solid and food waste, livestock waste, sewage sludge, clinical waste, and construction waste.

Control and monitoring of land filling and fly-tipping activities

Thousands of tones of construction and demolition materials are generated by various local construction industries. In most cases, a large portion of these waste materials can be re-used, reclaimed or recycled. With the control and monitoring of land filling and fly-tipping activities in the area of public works, construction and demolition materials can be resourcefully reclaimed, reused or recycled in other projects such as landscaping, village houses, recreation facilities or car parks, or roads. By applying these techniques and monitoring fly-tipping activities, the construction and demolition materials that sometime go into landfills which further worsen the management of solid waste can easily be managed.

Waste Diversion Plans

A multifaceted approach on waste transfer and diversion in terms of more hygienic and efficient waste disposal management can offer tremendous solution to waste problems. To address most of the waste problems, especially landfills and sewer material, the local authorities and state waste management facilities need to formulate waste diversion plans, with an objective of making certain that there is convenient and proper waste disposal at landfills and waste transfer facilities. Measures such as mandating equipment standards and rerouting of refuse collection/transfer can enhance the environmental performance of waste disposal operations.

Improvements of thermal waste treatment

Thermal waste treatments have been proved not to be 100% green as they are normally pronounced. Therefore, to mitigate the problems that come with thermal waste treatments – (issues such as emission of toxic gases with organic compounds such as furans, PAHs, and dioxins); states and researchers as well as green groups and academicians can explore the possible developments with regards to advanced thermal waste treatment techniques. Appropriate and improved thermal waste treatment technology is important as a strategy for tackling the environmental concerns.

Polluter pays principle and eco-product responsibility

Polluter pay principle is where the law requires the polluter to pay for the impact caused to the environment. When it comes to waste management, the principle will require those who generate waste to pay for the suitable disposal of non-reclaimable materials. For the effectiveness of the pay principle, it should incorporate charging schemes on all waste disposal aspects including construction waste and domestic waste through public fill reception facilities.

Eco-product responsibility policy, on the other hand, is a tool for waste reduction, recovery and recycling. It is achieved by requiring producers, wholesalers, importers and retailers to share responsibility for the collection, treatment, disposal and recycling of used products with an aim of cutting back and steering clear of the environmental impacts caused by such products. All these measures must have a view to reduce wastage and encourage re-use and recycling.