How much power does a central air unit use? 220 Volts / 8 Amps Sound about right?

How large of a solar array will I need to power this non-stop during peak daylight/sunlight hours?

If your state offers "New Metering" look into installing a grid-tie system. You won’t need to rely on batteries storing the energy your panels produce and if you produce more energy than you consume one month the utility company will actually credit your account for that surplus. I would recommend Global Solar Center as a good starting point (http://www.globalsolarcenter.com/). They will provide you with a free solar quote and inform you of all the incentives you’ll be eligible for, your estimated annual savings, payback period etc… They’ll provide you with all the info you’ll need to make a smart decision. Whether or not the system powers your entire central units consumption, at the end of the day you will be saving on your monthly utility bill. Your location will be a major factor as far as feasibility goes but you should definitely start by visiting that site.

Wow, so many great answers!

You want to use as little power as possible, so do not use a regular incandescent light bulb. Most of their electricity is used for heat, not light. Use a CFL (twirly bulb) or LED bulb. You can get them in DC power, so you don’t need to convert the DC power (like a battery) to AC power (like what you plug into your wall outlet). They are more expensive, but will save you a lot of money in the long run.

How many hours a day would the light be on? Let’s do the math with 1 hour, you can multiply it by how ever many hours you need it.

15 watts x 1 hour = 15watt hours (wh). (If it’s 2 hours, that’s 30wh) Take that number and put it in a solar calculator like http://www.altestore.com/store/calculators/off_grid_calculator/. It asks how many days you want to store in case you have no sun, how cold it gets there, and how many volts. That will tell you how big of a battery. 2 days, really cold, 12V, you’ll need a 10ah battery, that’s really small.

Then it will ask where are you, to decide what size solar panel you need. Here in Boston, I need a 5W panel.

To make sure the battery doesn’t get over charged, you should use a charge controller.

15W DC CFL Light bulb (equal to 100W incandescent) – http://www.altestore.com/store/Lighting-Fans/Compact-Fluorescent/Compact-Fluorescent-Dc/Phocos-CL1215W-12V-15-W-Warm-CFL-Lamp/p1007/

6W 12V panel – http://www.altestore.com/store/Solar-Panels/1-to-50-Watt-Solar-Panels/Sunwize-SC6-12V-6-Watt-12-Volt-SolCharger/p4218/

12V 12ah battery – http://www.altestore.com/store/Deep-Cycle-Batteries/Batteries-Sealed-Agm/Universal-UB12120-12V-12AH-20HR-Sealed-AGM/p1996/

4.5A 12V charge controller – http://www.altestore.com/store/Charge-Controllers/Solar-Charge-Controllers/PWM-Type-Solar-Charge-Controllers/Morningstar-Charge-Controllers-PWM/Morningstar-Sunguard-45A-12V-Pwm-Charge-Cntrlr/p793/

Or buy one already made with solar, lights, and batteries built in – http://www.altestore.com/store/Lighting-Fans/Outdoor-Lighting/Sunwize-Solar-Outbuilding-Light-System-10-Watt/p4644/

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What I would like to know is how exactly do wind and solar power companies make their money? Please, I’d like to understand the industry a bit better. Thanks!

Your question is fairly general. Perhaps you would like to read these introductory articles and then post more specific questions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

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If they are DC powered, used off your battery without an inverter, you’d need to do the math of how many watts and for how many hours. Many items have a label on the back telling you the max watts they use, multiply that times the hours a day you’ll use it.

Once you know how many watt hours you need a day, put it in a calculator like this to figure out the size of panels and batteries. http://www.altestore.com/store/calculators/off_grid_calculator/

For the fridge, if you can use a propane powered one, you are much better off. They use a ton of electricity, it’ll be expensive to try to power it off solar.

Didn’t Obama want a bunch of illegals in his green energy photo op?

Almost none. Those kind of manufacturing jobs are high paying, skilled labor jobs, the kind that Americans in unions have. There’s no need for unskilled undocumented workers.

Can you cite a source, and a factual one at that? Every photo I can find of Obama’s solar plant photo ops show him with workers. If "all" the workers stayed home, who is that he’s with?

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If you are in Honolulu, a solar water heater will pay for itself in 4 years, assuming it replaces an electric. Your electric rates are about 15 to 20 cents per kWh. If you’re in rural Molokai and paying 50 cents, the payback will be faster. Try walking your neighborhood (or just use Google map, satellite view), and you’ll probably see that about half the houses have solar.

For solar electric, the case is less certain. Call a local solar company to get a quote. It will definitely take longer to pay back than solar hot water. Hawaii gets a lot of sun, but it also has a lot of scattered clouds, so the average sun per day is really no better than my part of California.

Whether solar saves money on the mainland totally depends on the local incentives. Arizona and Colorado have fantastic incentives. California’s incentives are rapidly declining, but electricity is expensive here, so solar still makes sense in many cases. We have panels on our roof.

Space between stars varies, the universe isn’t evenly distributed. How far is 4 lightyears? It’s about 23,513,999,300,000 miles away (that’s 23.5 trillion). As for planets, that’s hard, because planets are extremely difficult to see from Earth. In fact, they’re nearly impossible unless they cross in front of a star while it’s being observed or it’s large enough and bright enough that it couldn’t possibly be life-sustaining (even though that wasn’t your question). We only know of about a hundred or so planets outside our solar system. Most are gas giants, none are Earth-like, although we know that there must be countless planets we can’t see.

Voyager 1 is about 10 billion miles away from the Sun right now but it’s technically still within our solar system. When it passes beyond the boundary, I’m sure it’ll make the news. As for getting to another solar system, yes it’s possible, but not in our lifetime. It will continue to float through space forever, until something hits it and destroys it, or (highly unlikely) some force equal to its velocity outward will push inward and halt its motion entirely.

Interstellar travel and interstellar probes are impossible with today’s technology. You can throw a baseball in outer space and rest assured that it will travel 4 lightyears, but there’s no guarantee it will manage to hit Proxima Centauri, or any other solar system, at all.

We lack the space infrastructure needed to do that so it’s decades away but it is probably the only way solar will be cost competitive (and if we didn’t have nuclear power which could provide the zero emissions power we need it’d be our best bet for solving global warming).

There aren’t really any countries that actually have significant amounts of solar generation (and certainly none that get the majority of power from solar, unless you count hydro-electricity or fossil fuels as solar power (but if you do that then you’d also have to call photovoltaics nuclear)).

I came accross a new, proven and tested home made wind power system and solar power system which eliminates our electricity bills. It was written by a Renewable energy enthusiasts Michael Harvey the diy called Earth4energy. You can get your copy to save energy and help environment while eliminating your power bills. Get it from here:

http://how-to-build-cheap-solar-energy.blogspot.com/