Scientific research has shown that our homes lose the greatest proportion of thermal energy due to cracks and holes in our home’s exterior structure.

Not only do they allow cold air to enter your home, but they also let your home’s heat escape more rapidly, which means you will have to heat up your home using your boiler/furnace more intensively and so consume more energy and money. Not to mention that cavities like cracks and holes also prevent your home’s insulation from doing its job, no matter how good it may be.

Keeping your heating on for longer, at a higher temperature, is the probably the worst solution for this problem. In fact, it is not even a solution – the principle of thermal equilibrium in physics tells us that if you heat up an object and place it in a cold area, the heated object will lose its thermal energy quicker and quicker if you heat it up more and more.

The same goes for homes – if you heat up your home more and more in an attempt to reach a satisfactory temperature level, in reality you are just forcing the thermal energy to escape even quicker through cracks and holes. It’s the same as throwing away 2-3 hundred dollars a year.

Surprisingly, this practice is very common amongst homeowners. If you are one of them, today will be a new beginning for you as you are about to learn exactly how to solve this problem and have an energy saving exterior – the right way.

Before we move on, let’s take a look at the preliminary options we have when it comes to figuring out where the holes and cracks actually are. There are two ways we can do this – the first way is to have a team of experts analyze your home, as they would do in a home energy check up. If you have a large home, if you don’t have time, or if you simply find it quicker and more efficient to allow experts to handle it, this is the better option. Otherwise, the second way is to do it yourself!

The good news is that this article will focus on telling you how you can find out where the cracks and holes are located in your home manually, by yourself. So, let’s get started!

1. The first step is to go outside and take a walk around your home and pay attention to the details of your home’s construction work. The aim is to look for any area where the construction work could use some improvement.

Areas needing improvements are usually where two different materials meet – for example, where your home’s walls meet the ground, where the edges of your windows and doors meet the walls, and even where your chimney meets the roof siding.

If you have a wall mounted air conditioning system, make sure that the edges of the system are tightly sealed. You should do the same for your windows and doors, or any other system that isn’t made of the same material as your walls, but makes a barrier between the outside of your home and the inside.

Once you have found out where your cracks are, you’ve done the hardest part of the job! All you need to do next is to make a little investment in something called draft excluders. Contact your local DIY store for more information on these. They will be able to guide you through the process of filling in the cracks and holes depending on where they are located in your home.

2. The next step is to take a look at your attic. The outside surface of your attic is most affected by rain, snow, and sunshine. How can you take advantage of this? You may have seen that solar panels are placed on home roofs rather than walls, and now you know the why. As for snow and rain, you must ensure that you have vapor barriers installed underneath the surface of your attic roof.

A good vapor barrier will protect your insulation from water vapor migration and prevent it from losing its efficiency, which can save you the cost of replacing it – about $400; more than 3 times the amount you need for a high quality vapor barrier.

Vapor barriers are usually made of plastic, meaning that they can last for years and years whereas even brand-new insulation will begin losing its efficiency after a short time of solid raining, without a vapor barrier, of course.

3. The final step is to ensure that your exterior walls and roofs have the correct and up-to-date insulation materials inside them. This is most important once you have the cracks and holes and any other cavities in the structure of your home all patched up, simply because the purpose of your insulation is to reflect heat back into your home rather than letting it escape; which it cannot do if it is in a place near even the smallest of cracks and holes.

By combining all 3 of the steps correctly and professionally, can save you up to $1,000 on your energy bills per year, if not more.

Applying what you have learnt so far will lead you to even further steps to saving energy at home and each step will cut even more of the money you spend on your bills. The investments may be large to begin with, but the bites they’ll take out of the money you’re spending every year will certainly outweigh what you paid for them.

Energy efficiency in homes is one of the very few guaranteed ways you can save money immediately and perpetually – but it’s the only guaranteed way of saving money, saving energy, helping the environment and even making money – and what you have read so far is just the beginning.

Adam Maher is a university graduate in a range of scientific subjects, and he is also a home energy expert. Want to know more about how to trim off those dollars from your heating bills? Claim Adam’s popular FREE e-course, available at: => www.eSaveHomeEnergy.com

With the cost of solar panels still out of many peoples reach (including mine) homemade solar panels are a very cost effective alternative. There are only a few steps to building a solar panel. First, you need to connect individual cells into strings of cells. Each string consists of 6 cells and you need 6 strings to make a panel (for a total of 36 cells). Once you’ve made the strings of cells you need to connect all 6 strings together.

The reason you need to connect all these solar cells together is quite simple. Each cell only produces about 0.5 volts which isn’t enough to charge anything. We hook them up in series (positive to negative) to increase the total voltage that the panel puts out. With 36 cells the panel will output around 19 volts which is enough to charge a 12 volt battery.

To start with you’re going to need to get all the materials and tools together. The materials you’re going to need are the strings of cells, bus wire, solder, flux, and a piece of 2′ x 4′ of plexiglass, and some silicone (clear). The tools you’re going to need are a soldering iron.

Start by peeling off the piece of paper on the plexiglass. Lay down the strings of cells and make sure they’re all evenly spaced apart. I use a small piece of wood for this. When the string is where you want it put a couple dabs of silicone on it to tack it into place. Do this for all 6 strings.

After the silicone is dry you can now solder the strings together. Place flux on the end cells of each string. The flux is needed otherwise the solder will stick to your soldering iron instead of the cell. It also cleans the surface so it’s a nice clean joint. Cut a piece of bus wire (basically tabbing wire, but bigger to handle more power). Solder the bus wires up so all the strings are connected together.

That’s pretty much all there is to connecting strings of solar cells together for your homemade solar panel. Once I’m finished that I usually take off the front piece of paper off the plexiglass and test it with a multimeter to make sure it’s producing power.

I built my own solar panels and a wind generator and saved well over $30,000. I get a cheque from the power company because I produce more energy than I use. If you’d like to learn how you can do the same check out Homemade Solar Panels.

Solar powered fans are fast becoming a popular solution for many homeowners to help take care of those hot areas in the house without having to mess with wiring or another benefit is not having to hire a certified electrician to install your fans.

We DO recommend at least getting the opinion of a professional Heating and AC installer on where to place your solar powered fans for maximum performance.

Ceiling Fans

What about that high ceiling where you need to bring the warm air down in the winter and draw hot air up and out in the summer…?

Solar powered fans are a fantastic solution.

Eco-friendly and easy to install, these fans will run anywhere the sun shines.

The photovoltaic solar cells which are usually mounted to the roof will keep your fan humming, and on the days you don’t need it, you can be running extra juice into a backup battery source so you’ll be able to use your solar fan on un-solar days!

Once installed, these energy efficient fans are basically maintenance free and better yet, FREE to run, taking advantage of Mother Nature’s wonderful, clean resources

Gable Attic Fans

While many homeowners are concerned about efficiently cooling their homes in the summer and are installing solar powered fans in various rooms, many times they forget about one of the most efficient and important places of all… THE ATTIC.

A simple gable attic fan can make a huge difference in cooling down a home.

Effective use of a gable attic fan can result in about a 30% savings in energy costs, and when you use a SOLAR powered fan for the attic, you will also be taking advantage of Mother Nature’s resources which are free!

With attic temperatures reaching as high as 150 degrees in the height of summer months, it just makes sense that getting rid of all that hot attic air with an attic gable fan or solar powered fan of some sort, will have your cooling units working more efficiently in the rest of your home.

We at Solar Powered Fans are hoping to help you some of your research on what some of the best fans are for your home and attic. Visit our page on solar-gable-attic-fans Here and learn how YOU can save 30% on your home energy costs this summer!

When you think about the benefits of using renewable energy for your home, are you focusing on yourself, or on the entire planet? There are advantages on a personal level as well as a planetary one. From the personal level, there is the obvious benefit of money. It is possible to sometimes generate more energy than you need, and sell it to the power company causing your meter to run backwards, reducing your bill.

On a global perspective you can’t help but think of wars brought on by the dire need for gasoline. Amazingly, national security hangs in the balance of this addiction for fossil fuels. Solar based energy powering our homes could prevent or curtail wars. If there is a bigger benefit than that, it is difficult to imagine.

Improving the quality of the air for our grandchildren and their grandchildren is another win that would come about is we all went green at home. The quality of life would sky rocket as many diseases and chronic illness would subside. Besides the obvious benefit of the quality and longevity of the lives of countless individuals, there is a tremendous personal and national financial bonus stemming from this. The health care costs saved from the illnesses avoid would be mind boggling and the repercussions would be felt everywhere.

Nuclear power plants release radiation even when they are working properly and there is always the risk of catastrophe as well as dangers of storing the waste. The first nuclear plants in years are being discussed. If we could power our homes, the green way, it would assure that there would never be anyone who could say with a straight face that we need to build more nuclear facilities.

Think back to your high school physics class; specifically thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics told us that the amount of energy stays the same. It can not be created or destroyed. The second law, the entropy law says that it can change forms, and the natural progression is to change into a less available form. Oil based energy is like accelerating the entropy law many times over.

Renewable energy, on the other hand, seems almost like a reprieve from entropy, an escape from the law, almost. It allows us to tap into the energy flow and make use of it, without running out of usable energy. Whether we power our houses, directly from the sun, the flow and movement of water, wind, or geothermal forces, the benefits of using renewable energy for your home are local and global, immediate and future, health and wealth, simple and profound.

Get your green energy rolling in your home this weekend! Use the Green DIY Energy Kit that reveals the simple method how to build solar panels for your home for under $200! Click the link for a SNEAK PEEK inside the DIY solar panel guide at the Green DIY Energy review. Build your DIY solar panels today and slash your electric bill in half!

We hear every day that our planet is in an energy crisis because of the ever expanding worldwide use of power. We also hear how bad our environment is damaged by all the fossil fuels we burn to make electricity each and every day.

Solar and Wind Powered energy are the best solutions to the energy crisis, because we have the ability do actually do something about the problem right now. The sun’s energy is abounding and renewable, and as long as the sun shines, the winds will blow.

The “Earth4Energy eBook” is an excellent resource, enabling the “Do It Yourselfers” to build their own Wind Turbines and Solar Panels. This kind of “Go Green Technology” can help you save thousands of dollars now, and time and time again over the years to come.

Why consider the “Earth4Energy eBook”?

1. It provides an awesome value for your money in terms of enabling you to lower your monthly bills 2. It empowers you do something about the worldwide problem of resource depletion 3. It gives you all the knowledge you need to actually build your own Wind Turbines and Solar Panels 4. It comes with tremendous customer service

When you consider the cost of installation, along with the lowering of your electric bills every month far into the future, the prospect of putting a little time and investment into your home now, becomes miniscule. Not to mention the reduction of your impact on the environment for all the generations of people that follow you.

Other resource books add useless and utterly confusing information. Making them difficult to read and comprehend. This hampers the confidence of the reader causing doubts, and may make the project seem undoable.

The content of the “Earth4Energy eBook” is fully detailed, with easy to absorb, accurate step by step instructions. It is so easy to follow, that even a beginner can feel confident in their ability to accomplish their goals.

The “Earth4Energy eBook” also comes with an “unheard of” customer service, that is fast to answer any questions or uncertainty that you may have, while completing your projects.

So then, “What are you waiting for?” Check out this wonderfully put together guide to the freedom to actually do something about your cost of living and the future of humanity, all at the same time.

Go to: http://earth4energyebookreveiw-bubba.blogspot.com/ and look for the “Click Here” link to the “Earth4Energy eBook”

I’m sure you will find this eBook to be a great asset in your future endeavors to “Go Green”.

For more information on solar energy, click here

Home insulation methods are a great way to reduce utility bills and the burning of fossil fuels. There are many other sources of heat loss in homes that will effect the bills, so come and have a look at the available options