Having been asked so many questions about solar power, since I know a bit about it and have solar power, I´m writing this article in simple terms to tell you what I know about it.

I´m not a nuclear physicist (!) just someone who has looked into it a bit before getting a system, so I do know what a system is made of and what you need to look out for to have solar electricity running efficiently in a home. Hopefully I can pass my knowledge on in clear language, free of gobbledegook and give an easy-to-grasp picture of how a solar installation should be approached, if you´re thinking of getting one.

You can run anything on solar power from a lightbulb in a shed to the whole electrical system for a big house, grand hotel or a castle with masses of electrical appliances! There´s no limit to what you can run off it. This article concentrates on domestic installations, since you won´t want problems, whereas in a shed you might be less fussy!

There are plenty of bad installations around, and people who don´t really know what they´re dealing with. Unfortunately there are shed installations trying to pass for domestic installations and they give solar power a bad image. Shame on the cowboy installers!

There are people who give you pitying looks when you say your house runs on solar power, simply because they´ve only heard of the bad installations (probably the sheds!). Unfortunately there seem to be plenty of those. Basically, your system is only as good as the installer. If you´ve had a cowboy installation, the best of luck to you, I hope you´ve got a good supply of candles and a gas fridge, specially in winter! Hopefully you won´t have had one of those though, because it still might have cost you dear financially!

There are also people who try and blind you with science and make out they know all about it and waft funny words past your ears that make you feel mentally inadequate and hopelessly uneducated! Half the time they don´t know what they´re talking about either. If they can´t explain things in a way you´d understand - they´re just playing games with you trying to make themselves look important because they feel inadequate, and they probably don´t have a clue how it all works anyway, or they´d be able to tell you clearly. Or perhaps they want to make sure you won´t ask them questions they can´t answer. Go somewhere else.

On the other hand, if your system has been installed properly, and tailored to the appliances you´ve said you´d be using, in advance, then you´ll have a wonderful life with it! You´ll be the envy of all the poor souls on mains electricity, who have to suffer power cuts when they least expect them, and for unknown lengths of time, whilst paying the electricity companies for this great privilege!

However, that doesn´t mean to say that solar power comes free. Far from it. The initial cost is high, and may well work out as the same rough cost as paying all your electricity bills for the duration of the life of the system, in advance. However, it certainly beats paying the same amount as for the installation, ie thousands of euros, to be connected to the national grid, AND in addition paying for bills ad infinitum!

However, once you´ve got your system installed, hopefully it will have paid for itself in the sense that you would have paid the same or more just to get connected to the electricity grid, which would then, additionally, send you bills forever on top. With solar, you pay just the once, in effect, with an extra payment some time when the batteries need replacing in 10-12 yrs. The panels should last at least 20yrs.

It´s really not cost effective if you already have connections to the national grid. Not unless the prices of panels and batteries and inverters etc drops significantly in the near future, which is unlikely! However nice it sounds to have ´free solar power´, in effect you´re better off sticking to mains if you already have it, unless you´re rich and like playing with new toys or so 'ecologically minded' you don´t mind going temporarily bankrupt to prove a point! One can almost see solar panels as being the new up and coming status symbol, flaunting wealth and ecological principles to the public with its gleaming panels reflecting sunlight in the skies - if one were that way inclined! I´d still like to know how people get up there to remove the dust though, when they put them in inaccessibly high places!

Anyway, once you´ve had it all installed, IF you would have paid a similar or higher cost for mains electricity to be installed, there´s no denying it´s a great feeling not getting bills and you´re definitely onto a cost-effective winner!

You´ll also have to have, as well as the panels and batteries, an inverter which will turn the 24v electricity in the massive batteries to 220-240v household current. I personally have twelve batteries giving me 24 volts, and they are each about 80cm high and about 12cms wide by 8 cms deep, so 12 of those take up a significant amount of space. They need somewhere of their own, out of the way, not in an inhabited place as they give off flammable fumes - they need a well ventilated outside place which is protected from the elements and animals, where nothing can fall on top of the terminals and cause electric disasters. They need their own well ventilated housing, in effect. It´s important you get a higher cost ´pure sine wave´ inverter if you want to run PC and high tech equipment, or you´ll risk damaging your equipment. For a household system this would be essential.

Batteries are very important as they´ll be where you store your electricity for the days that the sun isn´t shining. You need a decent bank of heavy duty batteries for household use, special ones for solar power systems like the ones I´ve already mentioned that I have. (Nothing like car or lorry batteries, these are massive, each one is about 8 times the size of the type of battery you´ve seen in lorries or cars, and they are called deep cycle batteries, and are specially for storing solar power). They will ensure you don´t run out, anytime, but specially in winter, as long as you have enough of them! A lot of people fall down on this, as they think they can ´get away´ with investing less in these but it´s false economy and it really is an annoying thing if the system´s not set up properly with enough batteries. Quite simply, you´ll have lots of power cuts when you´ll be right out of power, zilch, and will have to wait for sunshine to top them up again! It won´t be a matter of just flicking on a switch! Of course you could always top the batteries up with a generator, but then it´s still very annoying to be interrupted in the middle of doing the laundry or watching the tv and there´s the cost of the generator, the petrol and oil, maintenance, and the noise, plus generators can be a real pain to get going and started up, and they need to be put somewhere safe too. If you´re going for solar power which is silent and easy when it´s properly set up, there is no point in making life more complicated with generators.

There is also one important point with an expensive solar power installation. It MUST have a safety-cut out so that you don´t use any electricity below the safe level for conserving your expensive batteries. Otherwise you will ruin your batteries and be extremely sorry about that. Decent installations come with an electronic system that alerts you to low levels of electricity and warns you to conserve power and/or cuts you off before you can do lasting damage to your batteries. However if you have your system set up correctly, tailor made to the amount you will be needing, this shouldn´t kick in at all. But you do need it there!

You must be quite clear with the installer, when you get your first quote, about exactly what appliances you´ll want to be using, and for how many hours a day or a week you´ll use your appliances. That way, and only that way, will your system be able to deal with what you use and keep you running smoothly. It´s better to err on the side of generous use, obviously, and to allow extra for some things you´ll want to buy over the years. It´s amazing how many things you forget that you might want in the future, or even in the present, if you´re not careful!

However don´t go mad and think that while you´re getting ´´all this FREE (?)" electricity, you want to run everything everywhere on electricity, with electric heating, an electric cooker, fridge, freezer and ALL other heavy duty mod cons, unless you´re prepared for a hefty financial shock! I know a couple who did this and then thought the installer was trying to rip them off! He wasn´t, he was just doing his job. Panels and batteries are expensive, and the more watts you´ll be using, the more panels and batteries you´ll need. It´s very simple.

An electric cooker uses thousands of watts, and so does electric heating. You will have to have masses of panels and batteries to run those, and you´d be far better off, cost wise, (unless you are a millionaire) to go for bottled gas (cheap in Spain) or other methods, and certainly for heating in winter.

You CAN heat water with the sun via solar panels and a water tank on the roof terrace - but it doesn´t come cheap (in Spain at least) and you´ll also find it frustrating as it doesn’t stay hot very long in winter, and you may not have hot water just when you fancy it, ie just before going to bed or just when you get up in the morning! You´ll spend half your life thinking how nice it would be to have a shower but not being able to, and waiting for one! To make matters worse, it´s at it´s most effective in the summer when all you crave is a cold shower and the north pole (specially in July and August!), and least effective in winter when all you crave is a hot shower to warm up with! (Perhaps it´s ok in spring and autumn though!)

As for heating a house in winter on solar energy then again you need to be a millionaire to have SO many batteries (and space!) to store the power for upto a week when it´s cloudy, and LOADS of panels to capture the sun when it IS shining! You´ll have a massive, ridiculously high output of watts to run electric heating. The solar installer would probably tell you immediately it´s not a viable option, same as with an electric cooker, unless you really are very rich, and you also have the space for a large array solar panels over land with a separate large store for the batteries! I expect solar power installers get a bit bored with explaining about the high consumption of electric cookers and heating a house electrically!

Talking of where people put their solar panels, it really is funny to see a lot of people putting them high up on poles over their roof somewhere, because how are they going to clean them regularly? You need them to be easily accessible, (south-facing in full sun without ANY shadow), so that you can regularly clean them with a flat mop.

The dust collects very fast on them, specially in Spain where dust is phenomenal, and that cuts down on what electricity you get into your batteries. Don´t let ANY installer talk you into putting them where there is the slightest bit of shade at any time of day, if he does this he is incompetent or lazy as putting them in the best place probably involves more work on the day. You want to make the most of your big investment! Just because the shade isn´t on them at noon it doesn´t mean it won´t be at 9am or 6pm, when the installer has gone - if there´s a tree or a chimney nearby, be sensible about where you put them.

If you are building or renovating a place and can make big structural decisions, you could bear in mind that in winter you´d get more natural solar warmth for heating an interior by having large south facing windows or doors, but then you´d have to make absolutely sure they were fully removable or blockable in summer to avoid your space then turning into an excruciating oven. The summer heat through glass in June and August in Spain is not possible to live with at all, it would be unthinkable, and probably in June and September as well.

Familiarising yourself with the heat-making properties of ordinary things can contribute greatly to whether you create more heat or more cold. Glass with the sun shining through it obviously increases heat, and also anything black, or painted black, becomes hot in the sun - black attracts heat and stores it. White reflects heat. (Personally I´d love a house covered with magic paint that changed from white in the summer to black in the winter but I´m still dreaming!)

Anyone new to Spain, who is building or renovating, who hasn´t experienced the summer heat especially in July and August, needs to be very careful not to land themselves in a roasting tin with the way glass is arranged, and outdoor shutters, as well as opening/removable windows and glass, for this reason, are incredibly important.

You can easily heat up water a cheaper way than via solar panels, (the installers keep quiet about this for obvious reasons!) by having cheap coils of black pipe storing water, as black absorbs the heat from the sun and heats the water rapidly in a pipe of small diameter, and you´ll have great fun arranging that at virtually cost, not even solar panels or batteries needed! With the back up of a gas shower you can live with that as an outdoor freebie in nice weather if you have sufficient coils of black pipe with sufficient water in the pipes to provide a decent shower. You can have as much or as little pipe as you want, the more the better though. It takes two or three hours for the water to heat up in the sun. If it´s in full sun from the time it rises in the morning, you should be able to have a shower by about 11 a.m, and certainly by the end of the day - you just want to watch you don´t burn yourself in high summer! In the Spanish sun you´ll find even ordinary garden hose pipe heats water well and you´ll have to watch out you don´t scald your plants, by waiting till nightfall to water them (which is the best time to water plants anyway, as the cooler nights means you lose less water to evaporation and the plants get most of it).

The cost of the solar power system that was installed in Spain, including a day´s work installing it with 2 x 120 watt panels amounting to 240 watts, and 12 x 24 volt deep cycle batteries, and a 1,500 watt ´Solener´ pure sine wave inverter and an electronic battery level indicator etc, and automatic safety warning and cut-out, was about 5,000 euros if I remember rightly but that was in 2002. (You can get inverters that deal with higher wattages of course).

Technology should in theory reduce in price over the years but solar power may just be priced to keep up with inflation, who knows. There are surprisingly few competent installers around so there isn´t much fierce competition yet and demand isn´t that great so far. Many people are still shy of buying properties without electricity and always look for mains electricity when buying a house. (They´ve probably only heard about or seen the ´shed installations´!) But as knowledge spreads the use of solar power will undoubtedly increase.

For reference, I also happened to have two 50 watt portable panels I´d bought and paid for separately, for my motorhome, and I got them to add these into the system as well. Therefore my total system now comprises of four panels totalling 340 watts (plus the batteries & inverter etc of course!) You can get as many watts to use as you want to pay for though! The sky's the limit!

The cost of upgrading it with two extra 170 watt panels in 2006 (after some ridiculous quotes and attempts to rip me off by various companies) was, including the panels, installation and taxes, and without a grant - 2,000 euros. Luckily the original installer suddenly became available again after a long wait. Watch out, there are plenty of new installers of all nationalities coming out of the woodwork in 2006/2007 who are jumping on the bandwagon and who think people new to solar power (especially Northern Europeans) have more money than sense/knowledge.

So for the sake of knowing what you can use on a specific amount of watts as an example, if you´ve got 340 watts coming in all the time it´s sunny, for each hour of that, you´ve got an hour of using 340 watts in appliances. So with two hours of sun I get 680 watts, which would run something that uses 68 watts for 10 hours, say a small portable tv or a powerful fan. That should give you the general idea. A notebook pc can use upto 200 watts, a desktop far more, although each one is unique and varies. Of course all that power goes into your batteries for using it when you want it.

You can get inverters that go up to 3,000 watts, (possibly more, I haven´t checked - I just happen to know my own Solener brand inverter comes in choices up to 3,000 watts) Again it´s your choice, your wallet. An inverter governs how much you can run at any one time. So if you want to use hot wash on your washing machine, you´d need to find out how many watts your hot wash needs and make sure your inverter can cope with it, you may need a 3000 watt inverter for a hot wash, as well as lots more panels and batteries! (However it´s a fallacy that you need hot water to wash laundry well and there are detergents specifically for cold washes which disinfect everything). Plus if you want to be ironing or doing something else electrical at the same time, then that will knock things right up in terms of watts being used at the same time. Also, microwaves can peak on being switched on to a wattage which goes through the roof and has no bearing on the actual wattage of the microwave itself, for example. You get what you pay for. I found out that cold wash on the washing machine, uses only about 50 watts, give or take, which is nothing, and that includes spinning.

You will hear about people on solar power looking for low wattage things, low wattage washing machines, fridges, light bulbs, and it may put you off and make you think that solar power must be pretty useless. It´s not the case at all. It just means that people are making the best use of their 'free' (but expensively installed!) electricity. It makes sense to do that. It means you can do MORE with it! You can run ANYTHING on solar power, and you want to make the best use of it when you have it. It´s like having money in a bank account. You always want to put it where you know you´ll get the highest rate of interest. Or you can fritter it away and then have to do extra work to make more ´money´... ie buy more costly panels/batteries. It´s up to you. You can buy loads of panels and batteries at vast cost and use all the most indulgent high wattage equipment you dream of and waste half of what you´ve got if you want to.

For your reference, on the system that was installed in Spain there are low wattage light bulbs in three rooms with two outside lights, a 14" TV with Sky receiver, a video player, notebook PC, extra hard drive, pc printer, mobile phone, music centre, electric blanket in winter, a powerful fan in summer, a microwave, a breadmaker (microwave & breadmaker certainly NOT used every day), washing machine (cold washes) electric mozzie or perfumed plug-ins, AA and camera battery chargers, blender, food processor, electric toothbrush, electric dental waterjet.. and who knows if I´ve forgotten something..! I don´t have all these things on all the time simultaneously of course!

One of the first things an installer will do is tell you to use low wattage light bulbs, those economy bulbs that have a high light output for few watts of use. Using those means you use far less electricity on lighting, that can then be used for other things. If you use all ordinary bulbs you´re in effect wasting a lot of electricity, in solar power terms. If you have four ordinary 100 watt lightbulbs on for 5 hours a day, you´re wasting the electricity you could use to run a freezer! Far better to run a small freezer and change your light bulbs to low wattage ones! If you think they´re not bright enough (ie 15 watt lightbulbs that make the equivalent light to ordinary 75 watt bulbs, then just get two 15 watt bulbs - it´s then a lot of bright light and still far less watt hungry than one normal 100 watt bulb!) If you don´t work out properly what you need to run in advance of the installation, then you´ll run out. It´s as simple as that. You CAN run anything on solar power, it´s all down to whether you want to pay for many or few panels and batteries. If you scrimp or you´re not properly organised for what you´re using, then you´ll run out. You only have to be realistic and practical.

Every year the rebate system in Spain changes and it´s impossible to know in advance usually what you might get back. So to be on the safe side, it´s best to allow for no rebate at all, and then just maybe get a nice surprise. (But you may be able to get a Spanish installer who will help you apply for one - though he or she will tell you in no uncertain terms that he´s not responsible for the outcome. He is really not in control of it at all, so don´t expect him to be responsible for it in the long run) If you´ve applied for one, it also means you have to suddenly jump and do things, when you get letters out of the blue, from the rebate people (Spanish Govt) asking you to maybe appear in person in the nearest big town at some office within 5 days, or send photos of your installation within a week, that kind of thing. If you only live in Spain upto 6 months each year it could be difficult to be here when you might be summoned to do something.Maintaining the system involves topping up the batteries with distilled water about once a year, and mopping the dust off the panels whenever you see dust on them. Usually every few weeks, but it depends on the location, some places are dustier than others!

I hope that helps answer some questions on solar power installations for domestic use.

If you want to read further on solar energy, the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, UK, is on the net and has plenty of books you can get by mail order. One book which isn´t too technical is Living Off the Grid. One very technical book is Practical Photovoltaics, if you´re highly technically minded and into physics etc and want to start making your own! There are other books too of course, just do a search on the CAT website or on the web.

By the way, If you´re surprised and disappointed to hear about the high cost of installing solar power (solar panels, batteries and inverters), there is one other thing you can get excited about though, re REALLY free solar power in sunny climates (as well as the black pipe system for hot water!)

You can make outdoor solar cookers that SLOW-cook food, very very slowly, using the correct black, aluminium foil and glass arrangements. They´re very cheap to make but need constant hours of sun, really more for high summer use in Spain than slightly cloudy days. You can find plans and diagrams for them on the internet. These are in successful use in third world countries, they´re even used in huge catering establishments very successfully. However you can make them for yourself with just a cardboard box, a bit of tin foil, glass/polythene and some black metal containers or using a bit of black paint on metal.

Last but not least, there is a lot to be said for living independently off the grid, whether it be regarding electricity or water. With regards to water, yes, you can get water delivered in Spain where there isn´t enough rainfall for harvesting rainwater (but check who is available to deliver it before you buy a place without it and drop yourself in it!) If you want to live off the grid, it´s perfectly possible, even though It surprises a lot of people to hear that. If you want to be sure to get your own water harvested from rainfall though, Spain could be dodgy! Maybe France or other more northerly latitudes would be best. But in general, regarding living off the grid, don´t knock it till you´ve tried it! You would be amazed at how liberating it can be. You´ll also find that places off the grid are usually the best ones for tranquility and views! A wise word of warning if you´re considering it (anywhere) - check the mobile phone signal before committing yourself to a place - since in this day and age, communication is something you´d sorely miss, especially if you´re right off the beaten track! If you´ve got that, well, what more could you ask for!

Article Copyright Louisa Livingstone

Louisa Livingstone is a true European - half French and half Scottish! Speaks English, French and Spanish. Louisa lives in UK and Spain at the time of writing.

Louisa first learnt about living off the grid by visiting Ben Law in Sussex, UK.

Louisa is a professional astrologer but NOT the kind of astrology you see in the media, which is definitely NOT real astrology! (You MUST have your own unique chart done for it to work, and interpreted by an astrologer with experience and proper training.) Real astrology takes many years of training with a reputable school - one of which is the highly respected Faculty of Astrological Studies in UK, where Louisa studied it for 3 years to advanced level many years ago. Louisa has been practising it ever since. If you´d like to find out about consultations or email forecasts or compatability forecasts between you and another person, calculated from your specific personal time/s, date/s and place/s of birth, just email louisalivingstone@gmail.com

Email louisalivingstone@gmail.com

UK Tel 01342 429311 & mobile  07092 344405  Spain 00 34 679002147