Sam Deane answers:

Hi skiddo. Ive just bought molly an ant farm. Had never seen one before and came across it by mistake. Its amazing to watch the ants carrying bread and bits of wood to make nests. Its basically two panes of glass and the ants live inside.. Lol you have to catch the ants first though. Oh in answer to your question we just use good ole fashioned jam jars with grass.. Shhh the rspca will be banging down the door

Sam Deane answers:

Depends where you live, if your annual sunshine hours are high then you will save more than if you live at a latitude with less sunshine hours. Solar energy will not provide enough energy for a school, you would need a combination of both regular energy delivery to back up the solar power. I would use certified people, and for legal purposes it would most likely be required on school property. I hope your school decides to go for it because the long term benefits to the planet really do outweigh the big start up cost!

Sam Deane answers:

Your major power consumer will be the TV which may need anywhere from 200 to 500 watts depending on it’s type. The clock might rely on the frequency of it’s power source being exact if it is to maintain accurate time. While it requires only a few watts, it may need a much more expensive inveter. The TV Live only needs a few watts. You would probably want an inverter that is capable of delivering 1000 watts. It’s entirely possible that it would be more efficient at converting 500 watts than one rated at 500 watts maximum would be.

A 500 watt TV running for 8 hours would consume 4 kWh. A typical car battery rated at 90 minutes reserve capacity will have about 0.4 kWh of energy stored in it. You would need a minimum of 10. Car batteries aren’t intended to be run nearly flat on a daily basis and you may get only a few weeks of service life out of them. They will last far longer if you only use about 10% of their capacity. That would indicate 100 batteries.

How you wire them will depend on your inverter. If the input is 12 volts, all your batteries would be paralleled. 100 (or even 10) batteries in parallel can deliver dangerously high fault currents if something goes wrong. One shorted cell within just one battery could create a major meltdown or fire. Fusing each battery separately may be necessary.

Each of your solar panels will produce a little less than 2 watts under peak conditions and probably average about half of that during an average summer day for 10 hours. That means that each panel will contribute about 0.01 kWh towards your daily requirement. Assuming that your charging and inverting systems are 100% efficient (they won’t be), you would need about 400 panels.

With 6 kids you might want look into a solar hot water system instead. Such a system would be far more likely to save you some money.

The link below will let you download a free sample issue of Homepower Magazine. You’ll find the lead story in that issue to be well worth reading.

Don

Sam Deane answers:

First of all, let me advise you to spend a lot of time researching someplace besides Yahoo Answers. There are a lot of jerks here who will give you bad or just weird advice.

That said, I’m no jerk, and I’m fairly smart. So let’s crack on:

There are small, emergency generators that are designed for temporary or remote use. They’re usually portable, small enough to fit in the boot of a car with no difficulty. They won’t run much: a few light bulbs, a TV or computer, maybe a small refrigerator. They WON’T run all those things at the same time. They run on petrol and can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars. For an example: http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200402907_200402907

There are larger generators intended for remote use, like powering tools at a construction site where there is no mains power. These are more substantial and aren’t easily moved about without a truck. Where the previous example was relatively small and is designed to be sorta quiet, these big fellows with their jobsite intentions aren’t as carefully designed for quietness. So when they’re fired up, they’re pretty noisy. For an example: http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200402914_200402914 This one is about a thousand dollars, your local prices will probably be different.

The level beyond this is the permanently installed option. Before we were looking at devices that would simply sit outside your home, and you would run extension cords through a slightly-opened window to make things happen. Now we’re into the residential standby generator which must be permanently installed. A licensed electrician will have to make some substantial alterations to your home’s wiring to install the transfer switch and keep everything code compliant. When it’s in place, the residential standby looks a bit like an air conditioner. When running it’s louder than HVAC, but it’s quieter than either of the previous two models. These are designed to run on the gas the utility company pipes to your house, so no stocking up on jerry cans of petrol is required. Don’t forget to change the oil once in a while, though. For an example: http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200434679_200434679 This is the most expensive option and unlike the previous two, there are further costs to cover before you can use it.

As to solar, when there are storms there isn’t much light. You’d have to have battery backups. Installing a battery solar electric system will cost tens of thousands of dollars to do the whole house. But for a budget, you could take one room off the power grid, separate its electric supplies from the others, and install a battery backup solar system that fed that for mere hundreds of dollars. Do it modestly: choose a bedroom and the bathroom to solarize. Don’t worry about the refrigerator: if the power goes out in the middle of winter, just move the food outside in coolers. It’s already cold out there, it’ll be fine.

Sam Deane answers:

Start saving money