How does Solar Power Work - The Truth Exposed

Why use solar power in your home? Before we get into the technical aspects of a solar power generator and start looking at how it works, it's a good idea to understand why you would want to use a solar system in the first place. Solar power is a very popular way of generating electricity for your home, but why? Well for a start it's a way of generating clean electricity, which is pretty much for free once you have paid for the panels. Solar power can be used in a number of different forms to provide both heating and power to your home. Even if you don't want to bear the expense of a fancy solar system you can still benefit from solar powered garden lights, or solar powered fountains. Solar power is quite an established technology; it's been used on homes since the 1980's when there came to be over 10 million solar powered homes in California alone!

Photovoltaic tiles

A solar panel is technically known as a photovoltaic tile, and these work by converting some of the energy which is contained in sunlight into DC electricity which can then be used in our homes. It's important to note that an inverter is required to convert DC into AC, so that you can use it to run your household appliances.

A PV cell has a positive and negative slice of silicon which is sandwiched in between glass. When sunlight hits the silicon neutrons are lost from the silicon. Wires are then used to catch these neutrons which become an electric current.

Inverters are 95% efficient which means you will use some power when converting your power from DC to AC electricity. Inverters have come a long way recently, and should continue to become more and more efficient.

Solar panels are so popular because they require little or even no maintenance. They do not have moving parts and so can last for a long time. They should be able to last forty years, or more without anything but a clean once a year.

Powering your home with solar power

You don't have to stick to powering electrical appliances with the suns power; you can also use it to heat your hot water. If you are going down the route of generating electricity then it might be beneficial to consider a grid tie system which makes it possible to sell your excess power back to the electricity board.