PV Gap

Lester Said:

Is a propane fueled fuel cell capable of replacing grid power for home use commercially available?

We Answered:

There are a couple of vendors with home units available. Honda is one of them. They are very pricey and the electricity they generate may not be cheaper than the grid yet.

Janet Said:

What is the most reasonable form of off grid power for a home/water source?

We Answered:

Solar is the most popular.

The following article describe the advantages of solar power

http://recomended-prods.com/earth4energy…

This article is about living off the grid:

http://recomended-prods.com/earth4energy…

Terrence Said:

How can I use Grid computing at my home? I have 2 computers, and want to use the power of 2nd computer on 1st?

We Answered:

The extra power gained would be negated by the processing needed to distribute the processing and network overhead. Sorry.

For distributed computing to work, you would need more computers. 5-10 is a bare minimum, depending on how powerful they are. Also, day to day computing won't benefit. Something continuously processor intensive, such as renedering an image or movie is better suited to distributed grid computing.

Claire Said:

Wind Turbine / Power Inverter / Grid Tie Question?

We Answered:

Throw what you know of the value of the el-cheapo inverters out. They are cheap for a reason, they don't have to satisfy anybody, but your loads.

You need an inverter made and approved for grid-tie, to safely sync to inverter waveform to the line waveform, and to properly shut down when utility AC fails. They are also usually pure sine wave, while your el-cheapo use a so-called modified sine wave, no good to feed to the utility.

For what they have to do, they aren't that expensive really.

According to the seller linked below, a proper 700W grid-tie inverter costs around a grand.