Getting Started

electricity from the sun by John Drake II | home

Getting Started

First off, educate yourself.

Knowledge is power, it can also help you keep from throwing money away.

There is a lot of good information out there, and a lot of garbage too.

The first source I would recommend is government publications, such as information from

the U.S. Department of Energy.

I suggest this as a first step as there are a lot of armchair solar experts out there.

Some of them don't know diddly (how would you know?), some have an axe to grind and

some are just trying to peddle their wares.

Use some common (or nowadays uncommon) sense. If it sounds like something out of left

field, it probably is.

In over thirty years, I have seen and heard so much nonsense that it is amazing that anyone still

believes in alternative energy.

Don't be one of the folks that call up sobbing because someone either burned them on an

installation or gave them some poor information.

Before you believe what someone says, give it the acid test:

Does it make sense?

Is it practical?

Does it sound like pie in the sky?

What are their credentials?

Are they telling you just what you want to hear?

Remember that when everything goes South, it will be you standing in the pile of compost.

There are a lot of "experts" out their who give nonsensical information.

One thing that gets us in trouble is trying to "go on the cheap" when setting up a system.

My mom was a Scot and she was very tight fisted with money.

On the other hand, my Dad was not thrifty at all. BUT he was very careful when buying

tools, he was a heavy duty mechanic for close to fifty years. Once I asked him about the

life time warranty on some hand tools I wanted to buy. He said "buy the tools - not the warranty",

"when it is two in the morning, you are under a truck in the rain, in the middle of nowhere -

what good is a warranty when the sprocket in a ratchet wrench breaks or a socket splits?"

Long ago I figured he knew what he was talking about.

There are two kinds of warranties, the one for a great product that the manufacture has

confidence in and the one for junk where the manufacturer has enough profit margin to replace

a given percentage of failed items.

That said,

Buy what you know will work for your application, make sure that it is the best you can afford

(usually it pays to wait to save up enough money to get the best) and then you will not have to feel bad about it later.

I have seen many systems where maybe five percent of the project cost was saved by going the

cheapest route, and the system fails.