As energy costs continue to climb, and many people become more concern with their overall impact on the environment, solar power has become a serious consideration for more homeowners than ever before. When choosing to have solar installers install solar panels on your home, one of the first things that you need to do is get a good estimate of your home’s average energy usage. You can then work closely with your installer to determine the size of solar power system that works best for your home.

Gather Your InformationThe easiest way to get an estimate for your home’s average energy consumption is to gather your electric bills for the last year. You can then add all of the kilowatt-hours (kWh) that you used each month and divide this number by 12. This will give you the average number of kWh that you used each month. You can then divide this number by 30 to get a daily usage estimate. Because the average number of peak sun hours in the United States is 5 hours, you can divide this daily estimate by 5 to get an idea of how much electricity your system will need to generate each day during these peak sun hours.

Naturally, the number that you arrive to by this process is only an estimate. The cost of solar panels depends largely on the size of the system that you install. The estimate that you create will give you and your solar installers a good place to start when it comes to determining the size of your solar power system. If you are looking for more information about solar panels, the installation process, purchase and finance options, take a look at the rest of the information that we have available here at Solar Panel Info.

Maciej Winiarcyzk using more than two thousand digital photographs just over a month ago.

I have never had the privilege of seeing the northern lights in real life, but my sister lives in northern Canada and has told me about them. (She’s a pretty credible source: She even named her daughter Aurora.) After asking her, “What ARE the northern lights,” several times, I now understand the aurora borealis to be a visual effect of the collision of solar wind and magnetospheric charged particles with the thermosphere. Can you see why I had to ask what the northern lights were more than once? The northern lights are most spectacular near the North Pole and during spring and autumn equinoxes. (And, by the way, no. The northern lights are not Santa’s off-season hobby.) But the northern lights, if there are some geomagnetic storms a-brewin’, can be seen closer to home, too, visible occasionally as far south as Chicago or New York.

Anyway, this guy Winiarcyzk is an astronomy enthusiast who lives in Caithness, which is at the tippy top of Scotland. There’s isn’t much light pollution way up there, so it’s a good place for such a sky-minded person to live and enjoy his hobby. Wonderfully, with this time lapse video of the northern lights, we get to enjoy his hobby, too.

Take a look. Have you ever seen anything more lovely occurring in nature? You know, with all this solar wind, magnetospheric particles, thermospheres, and geomagnetic storms, it sure seems like there is a lot more going on in nature than we can readily sense.