Thin Film Technology Building Integrated PV

Going green .... What does it mean?

Here is a good article from Home Power Magazine

Watch this Video for some good insights on Green Building

http://www.ted.com In a short, funny, data-packed talk at TED U, Catherine Mohr walks  through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house -- looking at real energy numbers, not hype. What choices matter most?  Not the ones you think.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4w2DMscGw

Beware....

We have been working in Costa Rica for a while and have encountered a great many construction related issues that impact our energy management approach.  That is, we firmly believe that we should conserve energy first before we invest in technological fixes that are outrageously costly.

Ok, so your house has 5 mini splits and a couple of larger ‘zone’ units and you want to power the whole thing with solar energy to cut your high costs of electric use.

The ACs are a big issue is big.   What is the cooling load?   Why does it have to run so much and cost so much? Where does the “coolith” go?

To start with, from what we have seen here in CR, the cost of the place with the 5 minis and 2 medium AC units at the beach would cost you a quarter of a million dollars ($250,000) to power the whole thing with solar energy.  You would need a spare football field to put the solar panels.

If you took a fraction of that and retrofitted thermopane windows, installed awnings and properly insulated the roof, your need for power to cool your home would plunge.  Then we can talk solar.

Then, you decide that you want to put a solar/battery system in you home that is not yet constructed or under construction.  Smart - now we can design a sensible system that powers critical needs.  Things like selected lights, fans, alarm systems, communications, electric gates, TV, water pump, refrigerators and maybe a small AC go on the critical needs list.  You should also decide if you want a solar water heater and/or a gas water heater or a heat pump water heater.  Electric water heaters are out of the questions with a solar electric system.

Next, after we do a contract with you, we meet with your building team and talk about things like wiring

Now comes the crazy part, about 20% of the builders we have worked with here in Central America have their electricians follow the wiring diagrams with any accuracy.  They usually try to figure what they have connected when they are mostly finished and attempt to provide adequate circuit breakers. We have found the overall knowledge base on the jobsites as rather marginal.  I am not really criticizing them, just pointing out what our perspective is.

So when we connect our critical loads to their wiring often it seems to work until the pool lights (which were not on the critical load schedule) go on the same time the pool pump(also not on the schedule) and the water pressure pump go on.  Bang... no power, our systems shuts down. 

Your builder must guarantee that they can deliver the proper wiring that we will define during the development of your project.

Please contact us sooner that latter if you really want to “go green”.