BarrioBob Berrara's posts

Okay, so I want to go solar, I live in the desert. 
AND I AM SICK AND TIRED OF WAITING FOR THE UTILITIES/GOV TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT MAKING IT EASY. 

So here is my progression so far:

1. Purchase for 20k and that MIGHT eliminate my electric bill. Plus they HAVE TO put the panels where the utility says.

2. Lease for nothing and get a bunch of penetrations in my already old shingle roof.

3. I started to look into small solar panels and portable but the choices seem limitless.  How do I pick? Especially keeping in mind that I would like to start small and cheap and add on as finances allow?

WITH ALL THAT SAID, now the big question to me seems to be where to locate the panels?

One of the big reasons I balked at the purchase/lease options was because they would charge so much extra for ground mounts and would not allow for seasonal adjustments of the panels. 

I have a huge yard, with year round full sun, so it seems silly to me to stick the pv panels on the roof and permanently fix them to one place. 

I have a 30 yard long cinder block wall - running east/west - that gets FULL sun all winter long. That looks to me like a great place to locate solar panels. 

The same wall, however, in the summer is in the shade. So I would think that it would do well to lift up the lower end of the panels and get full sun all day in the summer.

My roof, on the other hand, runs north/south, so that doesn't seem to be a good place to put pv panels. But that is what the buy/lease companies tell me to do. 

I get the part about distance from my house, I think, but so what? There is a huge east/west open yard back there, so why can't I use it? 

EXACTLY. You got that right. I'm after killing my electric bill as much as possible if not completely.  Since I live next to Sun City I can probably find used golf car batteries on every other corner.  So that's a great start. Then what? 

Is it really as simple as buying the three or four components you listed, plugging them together, and then watching TV for two hours a night for no electric charge?

I've been thinking about taking my solar yard lights inside after dark and using them for evening lighting. They are the kind that use LED bulbs.  Is there a product available that I can take all the AA batteries from my lawn lights and use indoors after dark? 

My brother tells me I can buy a solar/wind generator and just plug it in to a circuit in my house like you would plug in any appliance. So, he says, then you just turn of the breaker for that circuit and run everything off of your wind/solar. 

Is this true?  From what I've read you can't do this because you could electrocute the utility linesmen because you would send juice into the grid - assuming you forget to turn off the breaker. 

Also, if this is legal, what is the product? 

I have a solar powered attic ventilator fan. Since I live in Arizona I figure I can unplug it for several months in the winter. So here is the question: Can I plug the pv panel into something else, like a battery?  Which battery should I buy to run say, my TV for an hour?