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Differerent Types of Solar Panels Simplified

By: Adie Duny

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We have available to us totally different types of solar panels nowadays and this text can try to simplify what's currently available for domestic use.
There are currently two different sorts of solar panels for domestic and business use, one is to heat water and the other type is to provide electricity.
Solar Panels for water are used more in the United Kingdom as they seem to provide the foremost price advantages to the user. Because of the climate within the United Kingdom and the lack of continuous daylight, solar panels usually work best between the months of May to the end of September when the sun is at its highest within the sky.
The general home will want around 5 sq meters of solar panel to provide enough heat for their daily hot water use.

Increasing the time zone by one month both sides to include April and October you will want to have insatalled up to twenty meters of solar panels this will, produce too much hot water in the hotter months and then this can and have to be discharged as this quantity of hot water would be impractical to store. Thus the sizing for solar panels is terribly necessary to not undersize.
There are two sorts of hot water solar panels, one is a blackened box with pipes running through it like a maze, the water is pumped through this box, the sunlight streaming in heats the box and also the pumped water warms up by the point it flows through the exit.
The other kind of hot water solar panel is made up of a system called evacuated tubes, these are tubes created from borescope glass (pirex) and they are made just similar to a thermos flask, twin walled with the air removed so the sun's radiation passes through it more efficiently.
Within the glass tube a sealed copper rod is fitted, this rod incorporates a little amount of pure distiled water within and then the air is sucked out to form a vacuum, then the rod is sealed.

The solution within the rod boils at a great deal lower temperature than regular fluids, because of the lower air pressure within the rod, when the water boils it travels to the tip of rod then condenses, returns, and then the cycle continues (providing there is still daylight).
These varieties of solar panels work extremely well on partly cloudy days because of the rods still cycle whilst the clouds pass over. The top of the tubes insert into a header pipe where water flows through, so the hot tops of the rods heat the water passing through.
The average house could need to have 20 to 30 evacuated tubes installed. The two main advantages of this sort of system is that if a tube breaks it can get replaced independently and on days with partily broken cloud cover the panels are more efficient.
Both these sorts of solar panels work best along side solar hot water cylinders, most properties have some type of hot water storage. These are mainly heated indirectly by utilising a separate gas boiler. The water heated by the boiler flows through a copper coil inside the tank and indirectly radiates the hot water from the pipe to the water within the cylinder.
A solar cylinder is different as it will have two copper coils, one at the foot of the cylinder for the solar coil and one at the top is for the boiler.
In this configuration the solar coil is always used as a pre-heat, heating the water at the foot of the cylinder, even on cold days because the in coming back mains water could only be around 8 degrees. Most days within the winter the typical solar panel, can achieve higher temperatures than this, thus slightly heating the water in your cylinder.
Hot water cylinders need to get to a temperature of 60 degrees once a week for thirty minutes to kill off bacteria and legionnaires disease etc. This can be where the boiler connected to the topmost coil within the cylinder can return into play. If there's, for example, a spell of bad weather, the boiler can be set to come on once every week to boost the cylinder for 30 minutes at 60 degrees.
All new solar panel installations also include pressure vessels for the expansion of the heated water, programmable temperature difference controllers, low energy water pumps, expansion valves and some kind of heat dump i.e. to a radiator.
The photovoltaic type of solar panel is used to form electricity generally twelve volts; these are manufactured using labour intensive methods. They are usually created up of micro thin silicon wafers, the panels are connected in series. Then the solar panels are fixed to a bank of batteries to use as a storage system.
This can be then transformed to normal household voltage using an inverter to intensify the power. These solar panels are better matched to more of a sunny environment as a result of of their expense in manufacturing, and less likelyhood of needing to heat homes as frequently as it would be necessary in the United Kingdom.
There is currently a brand new kind of solar panel being created known as thin film solar. It is manufactured the same way as a newspaper is printed; simply by merely printing on a continuous backing. In the case of those new solar panels the backing is a thin aluminium sheet, the cigs (copper indium gallium selenide) is the conductor and is printed just like an ink on paper. This new form of solar panel is not as effective as silicon based solar panels but the price in manufacturing is significantly lower and incredibly faster to produce. These solar panels are more flexible and can be shaped into many styles and sizes not like the flat rigid silicon based panels and, no doubt. We will all be hearing more about this in the future.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Natural Energy Solutions: solar panels to save the Earths resources.

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