Solar Energy For Our Home Solar energy gives and keeps our life – without sun and its light, we will not have day time, live in a dark, colder world that could not provide us suitable temperature, we then died of frozen; and obviously, no sun light, no plant can survive by “breath”- absorb carbon dioxide, and release out oxygen – thus, plant died, we have no food to eat, no oxygen to refresh our blood, then we will also die of hunger and breath difficulty. Solar energy is a vast resource of energy in our world, may be it is the biggest resource of energy – at least I have my intuition to recognize this – correct or not, it is the work for the specialties to count; anyway it is the vast resource of energy and convenient to be developed to apply to our life; directly to see and usage, for example, it has been transferred to electricity power, thus makes satellites work in out space, Moon and Mars explorer work/walk in the out stallers, and to illuminate part of our house, provide hot water, etc., it is already being used for our everyday life. Talking about our “everyday life”, let us focus on our home – the place we spend 2/3 time of a day where we stay at. 1st let us see the widely spread application of Solar – electrical power usage – Illumination. More and more people use “Solar” light to illuminate thus decorate their front yard, back yard, front walk path, front door……, but still, most home are keeping in use of “real power” to illuminate inside house; for outside house, about 1/10 of home (at least I see this in my community and near area) use solar light, the rest is not using any light, or use much less light by “real power”; the reasons of that may be the old power system is still there, the outside area of a house are relatively not need so strong light and people may not like to do the extra work to install a wide solar panel to receive sun light. The 2nd widely usage of solar energy for our home is probably for heating of water. I do not have chance to investigate how many home use solar water heater, but I saw a large number of advertisement of such devices. Some solar heater provide 24V, 250watt power to let people drink hot water, others provide warm water to use for bath, shower, etc. But still, this usage for hot or warm water is not popular yet. There are still other applications for solar energy applied in our home, but as we can see, right now it is not a full replacement for traditional power yet. Will it be finally replace it? Well, it depends on the development of science and technology. What I can see the limitation usage of solar power is its voltage and watt created is relatively low (24 or 12 v, several hundred watt, DC), it cannot be used for large watt requirement devices (most devices like refrigerator, cook head, air conditioner, TV…..use 110V, higher watt, and AC). But things may be changed gradually, at least for providing the illumination inside the house
