While solar panels can provide free electricity for your home, not so well known is that they can also heat your water for free! Any electricity that is generated by solar panels is used immediately within the home. However, if you are generating more electricity than you are using, which happens often (particularly if
It was sad news when the government killed the Feed-In Tariff, the guaranteed payments that solar home owners received for generating and exporting solar energy. There were a lot of complaints when the scheme ended on 1 April 2019, especially when there was nothing to replace it but promises of a new scheme. Fast
An important thing to consider when getting solar panels installed on your roof is the possibility of having trouble from birds and other pests. Birds in particular can be keen to roost under and between solar panels because of the shelter they provide - the result can be significant amounts of bird mess around the
I've had a PowerBanx home battery system for just over 2 years and it's worked well, but I always wanted to increase its capacity as one of the advantages of a PowerBanx system is you can add additional batteries to the core system at your convenience. Two years ago I wrote about how I
Many people want to know how much free electricity and income their home roof could generate if fitted with solar panels – if that includes you, then you’ve come to the right place.
The best bit about growing vegetables, of course, is the harvesting and eating. Having set up our raised bed, planter and mini greenhouse by May, we didn't have long to wait for the first results. In June we picked our first cucumbers from the mini greenhouse. Our first cucumbers (Image: T. Larkum) In
Charging an electric vehicle (EV) is much cheaper than filling a petrol car. For example, the cost of charging a Renault ZOE 52kWh is around £8 so if you get a range of 200 miles out of it then the cost per mile is about 4p. A Renault Clio, however, uses fuel at around
A few weeks after constructing the raised bed and planter, in April, I prepared them for planting. For the planter it was a case of lining it, to help protect the wood a little from moisture, and then adding a layer of old cardboard to provide some water retention. Raised planter with cardboard (Image:
Our Uncertain Future Blog - All Posts While my first attempts at growing food were not hugely impressive they were encouraging enough that the following year (2016) I made a more determined effort to produce food for the family. Since we had just a small suburban garden, with very little space, I started by
I heard a solar developer say that if the solar development was checkers, storage looks like three-dimensional chess, or for some, like a Swiss Army knife. Storage is complicated, and a new study of the value of energy storage explains some patterns we see in energy storage adoption and deployment. This helps explain why