Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

It used to be that the term "solar panel" connoted a solar thermal panel, which uses sunlight to heat your house or tap water, as opposed to a photovoltaic (PV) panel, which produces electric power. These days, though, attention (not to mention sunlight) focuses on PV. Many people assume that solar hot water heaters are all well and good for, say, Israel, but ill-suited to high-latitude, cloudy, snowy climes such as the U.S. Northeast. But Scott Wilson of Olney, Md., begs to differ.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

I've gotten some great responses to my call for stories about solar installations. In this post, I'll describe the grid-tied photovoltaic arrays that people told me about, and in a subsequent one, I'll mention other approaches such as solar thermal. I'm struck by the commonalties among our experiences. People report comparable subsidies and payback periods.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

Have you installed a grid-connected solar array on your home? If so, I'd love to hear about your experience! I'm planning to pull together a series of blog posts that surveys the variety of projects out there to see what common themes emerge. Please contact me offline at solarathome@sciam.com and summarize what you've done: the size of the system, its performance, your location, the subsidies (if any) you've taken advantage of, any problems you encountered, whatever. If you're blogging about it, include the URL and I'll link to it.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

I may be one of the few people in my town to have solar power right now, but if the news I’m hearing from the Solar Power International trade show this week is right, a wave of installations is about to sweep the country. I wasn’t able to attend the show -- this blog is just a sideline for me and I couldn’t justify a whole trip -- but I had a chance to talk with two conference attendees, Mike Caliel, CEO of IES, a big national energy contractor that has gotten heavily involved in renewables, and Harry Fleming, CEO of Acro Energy Technologies, one of the biggest solar installers in California.

Both of them called the show “overwhelming” on account of the huge number of new companies -- especially new panel manufacturers, and especially Chinese ones. “These new guys are dragging down the prices for everyone,” Fleming said. A year ago, panels cost $4 a watt, now it’s $2 a watt for brand-name panels and as little as $1.50 a watt for lesser-known manufacturers. With so much new capacity, he said he expects prices to continue to fall.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

Someone commenting on one of my recent posts posed an interesting question:

I wonder how much the albedo change of your roof offsets gains from electricity, much of the suns short wave energy must be being converted to heat therefore enhancing greenhouse   (as well as producing some electricity) can you prove you are actually energy balance positive???

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Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

What a beautiful Indian summer day to inaugurate our solar panels. The electrician finished wiring up the inverter on Saturday and flipped the switch, and I spent much of yesterday running to the basement and checking the inverter readout to confirm that the sun was indeed powering our house. The system isn’t hooked up to the grid yet, but at least we're offsetting some of our domestic power consumption.

I found that the array generated power almost all day, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. At first it was just a trickle, but it reached a maximum of 1,995 watts around noon (at our longitude, the sun reaches its highest elevation at about 12:40 p.m. Daylight Savings Time). In all, the array put out about 9.5 kilowatt-hours of energy yesterday.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

The first message I got from my wife last week was happy news indeed: “Solar guys are working on our roof!” As readers of this blog know, we’d started the process of installing solar panels back in February, and we had no idea what were getting ourselves into. The red tape for the state and utility subsidies took through the end of May. Then we had to get our roof restored, which added a couple of months. In early July, I told myself, the wait was over. How wrong I was.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels and taking other steps to save energy in 60-Second Solar. Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

I came across the following un-bylined news story from our June 1954 issue which I thought solarheads would enjoy. Not only does it recount the invention of the photovoltaic cell at Bell Labs, it provides one of the most elegant explanations I've seen of how the device works, though the predictions about its limited usefulness are charmingly dated. A brief excerpt from this story also appeared in the 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago column of our June 2004 issue.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels and taking other steps to save energy in 60-Second Solar. Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

When people talk about improving the efficiency of solar energy production, they usually talk about the panels themselves. What fraction of sunlight do they convert into electricity? Most solar cells today are made of crystalline silicon, but could cleverer designs or advanced materials such as thin films, organic polymers, layered semiconductors, and phosphorescent dyes do better? Probably, but that’s only half the story. The auxiliary equipment that connects the panels to your household wiring or the electrical grid is just as important.

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Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels and taking other steps to save energy in 60-Second Solar. Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

In my last post, I described one way to get around the bureaucracy of solar power: power-purchase agreements, whereby a company does the legwork in exchange for a cut of the government subsidies. Another way is to join forces with like-minded neighbors, which spreads the burden over a larger number of people and gives you some negotiating clout with installers, utilities, and city officials. A friend of mine in Washington, D.C., Ilana Harrus, is a member of the Mt. Pleasant Solar Cooperative, and I’ve invited one of the leaders of the group, Jeff Morley, to write a guest post describing their efforts—and explaining how you and your neighbors can do the same. Their experiences are very similar to mine, except that they've faced the challenges as a community.

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