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Earth4energy.com is a very hot website, hot in the sense that hundred of webmasters are promoting its $49.97 ebook with videos that states you can build your own home electrical system in your back yard for under $200. If you take a look, you’ll see it’s a page well designed to sell.

The page stops just short of saying that such a system will be adequate for all your energy needs and that you might even have so much power that you would be able to sell some back to your power company. I found that very startling, having had solar power myself.

I asked my husband Kelly, webmaster of several natural building sites, to read the sales page and give me his opinion about whether I could recommend the earth4energy information.

Kelly read it all and then said that there are a few people who are devoted tinkerers who might like to try some of the projects described. These would be the kind of people who have subscribed to Home Power, an excellent magazine on the subject, or who have tried some of the Mother Earth News plans.

Kelly is very much a do-it-yourself kind of guy, but he would be unlikely to build his own solar power system from scratch because there are many commercially available, professionally designed and engineered, warranted, and tested systems available. They would cost more than $200 but you would have something known to work and you would have tech support with any problems.

He felt that most people do not have the time, the expertise, or the willingness to truly build their own system for solar or wind generation power, and he expressed concern that people who tried would be frustrated.

Our  earthbag house in Colorado, which we have since sold, had eight 75-watt solar panels, plus invertor and a bunch of expensive batteries. We put that system in place about ten years ago for over eight thousand dollars and it wouldn’t be much less now. No way did it handle all our electrical needs – but it did keep our energy-efficient refrigerator (a Conserve brand) and kitchen and living room lights going.

Here you see the electrical solar panels, then a separate solar system we had for hot water, and below is our greenhouse where we grew tomatoes all winter.

So we recommend that you give a pass to that particular ebook. For a lot more about alternative energy, including recommendations for books, see the section on renewal energy and energy efficiency on Kelly’s website greenhomebuilding.com.

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