Findley - Solar Power for Your Home

Solar Power for Your Home

Other McGraw-Hill Books of Interest

Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits: 140 Simple Solutions to Lower Energy Costs, Increase Your Homes Efficiency, and Save the Environment by David S. Findley

Renewable Energies for Your Home: Real-World Solutions for Green Conversions by Russel Gehrke

Build Your Own Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle by Seth Leitman

Build Your Own Electric Bicycle by Matthew Slinn

Build Your Own Electric Motorcycle by Carl Vogel

David S. Findley

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To you, love always and all ways!

I would like to thank my brother Gordon for helping in my time of need, and assuming responsibility after my demise.

In the end, its not the years in your life that count. Its the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln

I would like to thank the wonderful people without whom my two books would not have been possible:

I am grateful to Carl Vogel for the introduction and Seth Leitman for the opportunity.

I am especially grateful to Patty Wallenburg of TypeWriting and Judy Bass of McGraw-Hill, who transformed my thoughts into documents and my documents into books, and for making dreams into opportunities and opportunities into reality.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his arent very new at all.

Abraham Lincoln

About the Author

David S. Findley is a former professor at Farmingdale State College, Farm-ingdale, New York, and the owner of Synergy New Technology, a not-for-profit green technology solution provider. He has also overseen the development of a green engineering sciences curriculum. This is his second McGraw-Hill book, the first being Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits.

If you believe the history of solar energy begins in the 1970s, around the time President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels in the White House (see ), you have underestimated the suns history by a few billion years. In fact, life on Earth owes a great debt, if not its total existence, to solar energy. The sun is responsible for all life on our planet, including us humans.

Fact is, the sun provides more energy in one hour than all of humanity uses, in all forms, in a single year.

Life is believed to have existed as early as 3.5 billion years ago. A single-celled, blue-green cyanobacteria, shown in , flourished in the sunlit parts of the oceans.

Trillions of these microscopic organisms have transformed our planet. They capture and use the energy from the sun to create food, and they release oxygen as a waste product. For millions of years, cyanobacteria has changed the Earths atmosphere from CO2 to oxygen.

Scientists believe that around 3 billion years ago, autotrophic animals (such as bacteria) diversified from earlier species. These autotrophs were capable of synthesizing energy from complex inorganic materialthat is, via the sun, photosynthesis, and other inorganic elements. These living organisms were able to tap into a completely new energy resource that was virtually inexhaustible: the sun.

Autotrophs, like cyanobacteria, produced substances required for human life. These bacteria fed on hydrogen sulfide, ammonium, and iron, and they produced oxygen.