Solar Panel Against a Blue Sky

Solar Panel Against a Blue Sky








Harvesting energy from the sun is a great way to cut down on electric bills.

I am seeing more of these solar panels go up in our rural area. Just down the road from us, right in the middle of a beautiful field, our neighbor installed four large panels.

The field has perfect, clear southern exposure and the panels are placed high enough off the ground to avoid the snow build up that will be coming soon. I would think they are still going to have to clear them off though - I will keep an eye on how it all works.

With all the trees around us, we do not have the correct location to get the most out of installing solar panels.

We have used the small walkway lights during the summer when the sun is high enough in the sky to get to them, but I think that is the best we can do for using solar panels, unfortunately.

So we have looked for other ways of saving on our energy bills. Turning off lights and lowering the thermostat are two obvious ones.

But taking those a bit further, we installed the low energy, high light output bulbs in all the lights - they even make these types of bulbs for chandeliers. And surprisingly, they actually look good in ours above the dining table.

Installing a programmable thermostat has helped us the most. We usually remember to turn it down when we leave the house, but nighttime is the worse - who wants to get up to a cold room in the morning.

Setting it to automatically lower itself after we are already in bed and higher itself before we get up really makes a difference.

I really love the idea of solar or alternative energy and until we can install some form of it, we will continue to reduce our energy consumption in any way we can.