ELECTRICITY USED (14 months):

06.07.10 – 22.09.10                      514 units    bill amount (inc VAT)  £72.75

22.09.10 – 07.01.11                      653 units     bill amount (inc VAT)  £94.17

08.01.11 – 06.04.11                      472 units     bill amount (inc VAT)  £70.97

07.04.11 – 02.09.11                      656 units     bill amount (inc VAT)  £105

total 06.07.10 – 02.09.11 2295 units     bill amount (inc VAT)  £342.89

this gives an average use of 164 units a month at an average cost of £24.50 a month ( we are low users )

We buy in electricity on a variable tarrif from EDF. According to the last bill we pay 17.36 pence per unit for the first 131 units, then 11.79 pence per unit for the next 162 units, followed by 12.83 pence per unit for the rest. I have no idea how these figures come about and if anyone can explain these please do so on the comments section.

It occurs to me that if our electricity companies were serious about cutting consumer demand, the units would start low and get more expensive depending on how much electricity was used. The above demonstrates that electricity providers want us to consume more – not less – electricity, because they are profit driven and more units means more profits.

ELECTRICITY GENERATED (13 months)

03.08.10 – 26.09.10                      360 units            payment                       £154.08

26.09.10 – 07.12.10                      277 units            payment                       £118.56

07.12.10 – 21.03 11                      375 units            payment                       £160.50

21.03.11 – 04.06.11                      679 units            payment                       £302.51

04.06.11 – 03.09.11                      736 units            payment                       £327.59

total 03.08.10 – 03.09.11 2427 units            payment                       £1063.24

1063 / 13 = 81.77 . 1063.24 – 81.77 = 12 month figure of             £981.47

this gives an average micro-generation figure of 187 units a month with a payback of £82 a month

In reality though, about 70% of the electricity production takes place in the summer. This is a good thing because between September and April, our panels are partially shaded by trees from 2pm onwards – resulting in (by my estimation) about a 7% overall decrease in their performance. Over the years I hope to be harvesting these trees to run the woodburning stove – which might hopefully balance out their gradual ‘natural’ decline in performance.

The first years results are clearly within the estimates given by R-Eco for this system of a payback period of around 10 – 11 years for the solar array. Given that it has not been a particularly sunny summer and that there are some shading problems, the panels have performed well.

After a year they show little decline, if any, in efficiency – I ‘clocked them’ a couple of weeks ago showing a 2.7 KWh supply with a clear sky with no haze at 12 midday. There have been very few totally blue sky days this year, more usual is a haze, quite often mid-afternoon, created by aircraft contrails.

Perhaps those of us with solar panels should form a ‘microgenerators’ group to request air transport companies to reimburse us for obscuring the sun with their pollution?

Our solar panels and PV installation in Cornwall were supplied by R-Eco, based in Penzance.

No.

Gas is gas, petrol is petrol and energy is the English word for prana, chi, or spirit which was in usage long, long before someone came along and used it in a different way.

When we talk about energy, we mean prana, chi, spirit – the invisible components of reality absolute.

Now before you say, “Ah that’s only unscientific New Age delusion,” I’d like you to stop and think for a moment.

If energy is a delusion, then it is one all of humanity shares and has shared for at least a hundred thousand years, if not a whole lot longer than that.

Addressing the energy realms beyond the strictly material in thought, prayer and experience is something that every single society that has ever existed on Earth took very seriously; and today, billions of people offer prayers, acts and intentions to bring about change.

It is entirely unscientific to dismiss the actions of billions of people across time, all races, all societies, all continents, all educational levels as all of them simply being deluded.

Indeed, to take such a stance denotes a type of arrogance that is simply stunning.

We energists take the point of view that there has to be something about human beings and their relationship with the world in which they live that makes spiritual action inevitable and also necessary for full functioning in mind, body and spirit.

We start our investigation into this extraordinary phenomenon with the question of, “What if all these people, including the most educated, more far sighted and most intelligent people over time, are right and there is such a thing as energy, there are such existences as energy dimensions, then how can we start to learn more about them without falling into hallucination or delusion?”

The answer I have given to this question is to stay with the direct personal experience of human beings, and to investigate the energy experiences of living human beings who can be observed, questioned, and who can test out theories in their actual lives so we can find out what happens if one makes energy interventions.

In my practice, we start out simply with the energy body.

Every human being has one, and this being so, there must be a way in which this energy body manifests itself, comes to our attention.

I have found to my great surprise that the energy body makes its presence known through the medium known as “emotions” – physical sensations that a person can feel in their body which have no physical origin.

Using an inclusive paradigm, a way of thinking that includes the reality of energy occurrences, human emotions and all their many serious manifestations begin to make sense. Not only that, when we use interventions based on the energy inclusive paradigm, we get reliable and repeatable results that can be seen, heard, documented and most of all, felt.

As such, personal experience is created and this how a person knows what’s right, and what true, and what is really here.

With energy work and the 3rd Field, in a way we are in a wonderful position. We are right at the start of a proper intelligent and logical scientific investigation of a phenomenon that is clearly essential to all human doings from the cradle to the grave; and here, each one of us becomes their own scientist.

Instead of blindly “believing” what is written in an old scroll or a modern text book by someone else who is said to be so much more knowledgeable and capable than you, or me, or any other human being alive today, we ask that each person reflects on their own experiences, and runs their own tests and trials to convince no-one at all but only themselves of what is right and true in their own personal experience.

There are many modern energy practices available today, some of which, like my EmoTrance, are structurally designed to teach us how we can learn more about these mysterious energy worlds without getting confused, scared, or drifting off into make-belief and hallucinations.

A first step for an energy greenhorn who may have been told that energy is just nonsense by folk in authority is to consider their own experiences with emotions in their own lives. Everyone has those experiences, and even a person who thinks they experience no emotions themselves can certainly observe how emotions work in other people, and start to factor in that X factor of energy exchanges and their effects on the human energy body.

Our own experiences and our own bodies, our own relationships are the ground point zero of beginning to understand energy.

I recommend to read the EmoTrance Primer which explains in simple words how energy affects us personally through the medium of our emotions.

That’s a first start, and from there, it’s over to you.

It’s up to you what you wish to investigate, how you would like to proceed.

There is no University for Energy as I type; but it is my desire that the 3rd Field will now take its rightful place alongside psychology and physiology so that a more complete understanding of how human beings work in the context of real reality may emerge over time.

In the meantime, whatever information you are presented with, test it against your own life’s experience. If it holds up, consider it for further investigation; if it does not, simply ignore it and move on. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what you should think or feel instead of what you are really thinking and feeling. Ask questions, seek answers that fit with your own personal experience.

Human beings have a fantastic neurology, each one of us, and we certainly have the wherewithal to learn, think, and make up our own minds in the light of our own personal experience.

Discovering energy as the X-Factor in so many previously irreconcilable equations of human behaviour is the doorway into a truly fascinating world, rich with new experiences, rich with new wisdom and knowledge. I would say it is one of the most exciting fields of investigation and discovery possible, so I welcome you and encourage you to keep learning more about energy, conducting your own experiments so that in time you too might get a sense of what the energists of the ages have been raving about.

With best wishes,

Dr Silvia Hartmann

Author, EmoTrance: Emotions, Energy, Information & Love, DragonRising 2011

Any motivated do-it-yourselfer can learn how to make solar panels for their home, workshop or business. When compared to the cost of purchasing and installing a pre-made solar energy system, learning how to make solar panels for your energy needs and the materials you need to execute the project are far less. By learning how to make solar panels for yourself, you have greater control over the size and design of your system as well.

Once you have a quality manual and you have learned how to make solar panels, the supplies are fairly simple to find. Most can be found at your local hardware store like, plywood, sheets of glass, and a roll of copper wire. It is also easy to locate inexpensive solar or photovoltaic cells to use in your project. Many are available over the Internet or you may have a retailer available locally. One you’ve learned how to make solar panels and you have your supplies, it usually takes about a day to assemble a 100-watt panel. This is the perfect amount of electricity to operate small appliances or a small workshop.

The most important step is finding a quality manual with detailed instructions for learning how to make solar panels. In many cases you get what you pay for, so don’t be afraid to spend a few extra dollars on a well-reviewed instruction manual. Overall, the cost of the making your own panels is so low, the price of the how to guide is minimal-you will still be paying way less learning how to make solar panels on your own than purchasing a professionally installed system.

With a little bit effort, you can be on your way to learning how to make solar panels to meet your energy needs. Then sit back and bask in the pride the next time the power goes out in your home. Your lights will still be on because you learned how to make solar panels and your energy supply is still in your battery bank.

It is possible to completely build your own solar panel, but for the most part, these panels are small and do not produce the wattage necessary to power more than a simple lamp and only for a couple of minutes. The most effective way to produce power from the sun, when you can’t afford to hire the professionals, would be with a solar panel kit. These build your own solar panel kits come with everything you need to successfully build your own solar panel in the comfort of your living room, or the garage may be a wiser choice.

Surprisingly, build your own solar panel kits are not difficult to find. With large companies like GE producing these kits, the build your own solar panel sets are very affordable and offer quicker return on your investment than purchasing and professionally installing a solar energy system. In general the instructions are easy to follow, even for teens and children, and in no time you are on your way to your own solar power system.

If you are looking to build your own solar panel there are a numerous resources and guides available to help you through the process. By involving the whole family in the building process, every one will learn how a solar power system works and exactly how the components are put together. Also, when you build your own solar panel you are giving yourself the knowledge to expand your system on your own, without calling back the installers, and the ability to adapt your current system to meet new design needs.

Making the choice to build your own solar panel is a great investment for your future and the world’s future. Start making your own power at home and take advantage of this great way to educate yourself while saving money and helping the environment and learn how to build your own solar panel today.

When applied to heating or lighting in the home, there are many ways to increase the efficiency of the energy we use and hence cut down on costs. This also has the added benefit of helping the environment cope with the massive carbon footprints and greenhouse gases for which many of us are responsible.

New technologies are increasing energy efficiency in our homes and businesses. According the International Energy Agency, energy efficiency alone will be responsible for reducing the world’s energy needs by a third by 2050. Improvements in building design, effective insulation, new lighting technologies and better use of daylight are all examples of energy efficiency at work.

Combined with sources of renewable energy, energy efficiency will certainly help cut the planetary pollution presently in play, but there are other interests at work here. Our economy for example has relied on increasing consumption of goods and services to increase the flow of money. The idea of meeting our energy needs by increasing energy efficiency runs somewhat counter to this, one of the reasons why we have been quite slow on the uptake.

One example is our use of the car – a hideous example of energy efficiency. There have vested interests at work that want us to consume as much petroleum as possible because it creates maximum profit. Hence our cars are generally about 20% energy efficient in their use of fuel. Estimates from a ‘sustainable’ base, including the real costs of the earth in generating crude oil and dealing with the polluting after-effects of petrol tell us that one barrel of petroleum is worth in the region of a million dollars. It is a resource we have simply squandered through ignorance. Estimates show that up to 75% of energy used in the United Stated could be saved with relatively simple efficiency measures.

California started energy efficiency measures in the 1970’s and their use of electricity per person has remained reasonably stable since then whereas in the rest of America the consumption has doubled. Climate change talks in Vienna in 2007 concluded that real reductions in harmful emissions could be made cheaply through increasing energy efficiency.

More and more people are becoming ‘energy aware’, a state of mind that avoids waste of resources. ‘Doing more with less’ is an attitude at the heart of the new green frugalisms. There is a certain elegance, even beauty, in voluntary simplicity and an attitude that increases awareness to avoid waste.

However, the universe is made of energy. In 40 minutes, enough energy from the sun reaches our planet to service human needs for a whole year. With such riches available in the form of renewables, is the main issue ‘energy efficiency’ or our ability to harvest and store this abundance?

It was only 100 years ago we were nearly all in this position – naked without our appliances! These home appliances are now changing fast as energy efficiency becomes built-in. ‘A’ rated refrigerators for example, use 40% less energy than fridges purchased in 2001.

New dishwashers, oven and cookers, deep freezers, microwaves, kettles, washing machines and dryers, air conditioning and heating systems all carry an ‘Energy Star’ or some other rating to show their level of energy efficiency. In the modern energy efficient home it is important that we look for these ratings and understand what they mean.

But energy efficiency in the home means a lot more than just buying the latest, low energy, consumer durable. There are many ways to become more energy efficient at home, from getting up earlier and using the daylight to putting on more clothes rather than turning up the heater. Many people are discovering that, like 100 years ago, a family sing-song round the piano is not only cheaper in energy terms than the brain-death of watching television, but a lot more fun.

Scrutinise your home for ways to save energy. Take a walk round every room and check for drafts, take a notebook and start a list!  It will also save you money. Are the loft, walls, windows, doorways haemorrhaging your cash? It’s remarkably easy to sort these out. Even taking a week off work to do this will pay for itself in a very short time, especially as the price of energy delivered to your home continues to rise.

Check you are not heating unused rooms or wasting heat through open doors or windows. Put your washing and drying machines onto cheaper cycles. Check your appliances have a ‘power-off’ or sleep mode – fortunes are wasted every year just keeping TVs and computers on stand by. When you make a cup of tea with the kettle, make one for later and put it in a thermos to save boiling the kettle all the time. Kettles are one of the highest electricity users in the home so check also that you are not boiling more water than you need. Just this one action can save a lot of money every year.

The ideal temperature is between 18 to 21 degrees Celsius (65 to 70 Fahrenheit). Simply turning the heating down a bit and wearing more clothing is a simple and easy way to save a lot of money and it doesn’t encourage germs and viruses. It will also make you feel all virtuous! There are many other things we can do to reduce gas, electricity or oil costs in our homes.

My partner Sarah loves wearing a hat inside in the winter, which is a source of great amusement as she has quite a collection. Fortunately I am blessed with a good head of hair so don’t wear one. I must however confess to wearing a hoody quite often – even a double layer! Most of the heat in a human body leaves by the head so this is a great way to keep warm.

We also move into the spare room in the winter, which is smaller and more central in the house. We turn off the radiator in the big bedroom, shut the door and hang a curtain in the passageway leading to it. This creates a considerable saving, about 20% of the house heating costs. Although we have an oil fired central-heating system – we very rarely use it – even in the depths of winter.

As Sarah goes out to work and I work at home, I bought a small caravan to use as an office and installed the tiniest pot bellied stove you ever did see. It gets really warm in there and saves heating the whole house for just one person (and the dog).

For the evenings in winter – we zone the warmth in the house using lined curtains. One set separates the kitchen from the living room (which is accessed through an open arch usually). Then we halve the size of the living area with another set of curtains across the middle, and sit in the top end next to the woodburner.

Many people are converting their home heating to wood burning or multifuel stoves in response to increasing energy costs. Gathering, sawing and burning your own wood is just a really efficient way to save energy and cut bills. Firstly you get warm (and fit) collecting the wood, packing it and getting it home. Then you get warm (and fit) sawing it up. Then you get warm sitting near it as it burns!

Finding a good mixture of work types on winter days is a useful way to keep warm. Incorporating physical work into a daily routine, if you don’t do it already, helps keep the blood warm. But it doesn’t all have to be work. One of my personal favourites is dancing (we salsa)!

Even little tricks such as incorporating ginger, garlic, warm spices and peppers into the winter diet help build up the body’s ability to keep itself warm. I love hot French onion soup with cheese on toast but whole, oven-roast onion has all sort of beneficial elements.

Back to the basics of heating a home! Prices fluctuate. Is oil, gas or electricity cheaper this year? Multiple heating sources can help to save money. Zone heating is also a good way to concentrate heat where you need it, like a low kilowatt electric heater (safely) under the desk at which you work. The closer you can zone the heating to the person, rather than the building, the less it is going to cost. I sometimes warm the bed up with a hair dryer before getting in, but never underestimate the simple brilliance of a hot-water bottle and a blanket!

There are political issues here in that microgenerated power is ‘decentralised’, ie out of the control of a monopoly. If you swing that way, generating power at home is a very good way to evade your involvement in centralist monopolies.
A recent ‘intermediate technology’ experiment in an African village shows how creative we can get with this. The village had a very deep well and no electricity. They built the children a playground with a roundabout that powers a pump to bring the water up into a header tank. Now the children have somewhere interesting to play and the village has a pressurised water supply! I’m not suggesting that you wire the children up to the mains (and how we all want to sometimes !) – but the chances are that there is free energy up for grabs somewhere in or near your home. Solar power technology is more commonly being used to pull water up from deep wells – but funding for this in third-world countries is a big issue

The two most realistic options for home power are wind and solar. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Solar photovoltaic panels only really work well when the sun is out. They are still expensive and although it is cheaper to make them than to buy them it means you get no tarrif. They have quite low efficiency – at best up to about 15% and need a whole load of other stuff to regulate and store the power if you don’t sell it to the grid. It may be worth installing a 12 volt lighting system for your home to use this power efficiently – the bulb technology is easily up to it with LED lighting designed to run on 12 volts.

Much more efficient is a solar water heater that can warm your water – still the most efficient way of storing home generated power. My own ‘home made’ solar water heating panel heats the water up to 47ºC when the sun is out – easily warm enough for a luxurious ‘free’ hot shower.

Wind power is a very realistic alternative power source in many parts of the country. Planning regulations can create a problem and there are also noise issues that need to be addressed. There are some excellent manuals on how to make your own power-generating windmill or solar collectors, even using recycled materials such as used vehicle alternators.

Solar panel technology is certainly growing up – although it is quite an expensive investment to start with. PV (photovoltaic) cells convert sunlight into energy that can be stored or used directly. They are made by taking silicon crystals (grown from sand) and impregnating them with a chemical substance called a semi-conductor to create oppositely charged layers. The layers are covered with glass to make a PV panel. The sun hits the layers and frees electrons that make an electric current. Several PV panels can be linked together to increase a local energy supply.

Some of the energy gets lost in this process and the most common PV panels still only convert somewhere between 4% – 13% of the sun’s energy into electrical energy, although this is improving with the technology. PV solar panels are ideal for lighting needs and can even supply 25% of a household’s needs in the winter and about 75% in the summer. Although they can be expensive to buy and install, there are feedback tarrifs in the UK to make this worthwhile.

Solar Water heaters

Solar water heaters use the sun’s energy to pre-heat cold water that is then stored. Even raising the temperature of your water a few degrees using ‘free energy’ creates a saving on your domestic fuel bill. Solar water systems can supply about half the energy needs for hot water in an average household. It is quite easy to make and install your own.

Passive Solar Energy

Passive solar energy is created by the way your house is laid out. It is a ‘new consideration’ in energy efficient homes although it can be incorporated into existent builds. One way to do this is to add on a greenhouse or conservatory to a south facing wall. The sun heats the air in the greenhouse and you open the door between the house and the greenhouse and let the warmth flood in.

Purpose-built, passive solar windows are windows installed at a carefully chosen angle. These reflect the excess heat in the summer and absorb the maximum in winter. The space between the front and internal windows acts as a buffer zone, insulating the inside. These spaces are sometimes used to grow plants that process waste water from the building.

Wind power

You must have seen small windmills on boats and vans by now. The micro-generation of energy through wind is ideal for 12 volt lighting systems and once again this is a free energy source that nearly anyone can tap into. Wind power is used to turn an electricity-generating turbine, from huge windmills on the landscape to smaller localised versions; they can vary from a few hundred watts up to several megawatts. Household sized wind systems are usually two or three kilowatts.

Heat exchangers

In some areas of the world heat from under the ground is captured (thermodynamic energy) and used to provide central heating and hot water. An electric pump is used to bring up the heat and for every energy unit this pump costs to run, it gives up to 6 units of heat. This is still a very expensive technology to set-up and is used for large buildings or building complexes and designed in at the building stage.

Some people who live by water use heat exchanger technology to extract and store heat from streams or rivers, a sort of modern equivalent of a water wheel. Others actually have heat exchangers fitted to their baths to reclaim heat from bathwater before pulling the plug. Some properties have a very warm roof cavity at various times of the year and heat exchangers can be used to redistribute this heat around the house or store it to water.

You might think that with all this energy falling from the sun, tidal power, wind power and other renewable sources that the solution to our energy problems would be easy – simply switch over. The problem is that vested interest has kept the development of alternatives ‘quiet’ over the last 25 years or so. We are not ready to switch yet as the technologies are not where they need to be. Even James Lovelock, instigator of the Gaia hypothesis, an alternative theory about life on earth, suggests that in the short term we will have to rely on increased nuclear power to feed our expensive energy habits.

Mostly our homes run on 240 volt systems whereas many of our devices can now run on 12volts – certainly lighting technology is easily able to run at this lower energy requirement. Look around the house and I expect you will find a plethora of devices running at 15, 12, 9, 6, 4.5, even three volts – all with ugly black plastic transformers to ramp the supply down enough. But rewiring our homes and devices to run on 12 volts is too huge a job – unless we voluntarily undertake it as individuals. This means that some of high power devices – kettles, washing machines, dryers and so on will not work (yet).

The decentralisation of energy supply is another issue in the economies of energy. The power that pays for governments often comes from large industry; centralised monopolies are a large part of the capitalism that runs our economy. Harvesting our own energy supplies ‘from the wild’ still runs counter to the interests of a culture based on ‘consuming’ what is supplied to them in order to create a money stream.

Planning regulations in many areas disallow windmills on domestic properties. While this is certainly reasonable it is a disincentive to invest for many people. Add to this a lack of regulation and standardisation and it becomes easy to see why slowing down global warming by diminishing our energy supplies is more complex than it looks.

The oft (mis)quoted ‘Nobody changes until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change’ would seem to apply to our energy habits in the Western World. But this quote is evidently for people who’s lives know only pain. Many people are happily changing to a new economy of energy that goes way beyond physics. Many people are discovering the joys of frugalism in which the responsible use of our resource of energy is just one aspect of walking gently on the face of the earth.