Save Money, Save The Earth, And Improve Your Home: Solar Panels

As we've witnessed quite a few times in recent history

, oil prices can go sky high pretty quickly. When the price of oil goes up, it creates a ripple effect where almost everything that we use also gets more expensive. One of the things that get seriously more expensive is energy. Besides the cost factor, there's also the increasing focus on alternative, green sources of energy that won't harm the planet. All this results in a renewed interest in solar energy as a viable alternative.

The cost of solar panels has always been the main obstacle to its widespread adoption. Even today, it still is a factor, although prices have come down considerable over the past couple of years. The reason why solar panels are expensive is that manufacturing them involves complicated engineering procedures. There's a cost associated with them. Another reason that is sort of a corollary of the first reason is that since the barrier to entry is high (high investment required), there's not that many companies manufacturing solar panels, which means that there isn't enough competition to drive prices down even faster. Because of this, solar power energy is still too expensive for mainstream adoption.

Fortunately, renewable energies (which include solar energy) have been the subject of governmental focus, and a lot of incentives have been put in place to encourage private companies to put money into research and development so that the technology becomes cheaper, becomes more widely adopted, and reduces America's dependence on other countries for its sources of energy.

For the individual homeowner looking to cut down on electric bills, there's a very cost-efficient option that involves solar panels: the do-it-yourself solar panel kits. Essentially, what you end up doing is assembling your own solar panels, using kits that you buy from stores like Home Depot or Lowe's. The main draw of these kits is that they cost forty to sixty percent less than the other options.

As mentioned earlier, getting solar panel technology to affordable levels has always been one of the problems with the technology. Experts, though, predict that the downward trend of panel prices will only accelerate in the coming years. As things stand today, each panel costs about five hundred dollars, and that includes the accessories you need to hook up each panel. Hiring someone for the installation adds to the cost, unless you choose to handle it yourself. The do-it-yourself option cuts that price to about two to three hundred dollars per panel.

Depending on the size of your house, converting your entire house to solar power will run you between ten and thirty thousand dollars. But not everyone needs that, as most people are just looking for a way to decrease their power bills with an environmentally-friendly solution. If that's your case, you can do that at a fraction of that cost.

by: Nicole McMahon

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