Power Your Home of Tomorrow with Solar Energy

As you’ve seen here on Tech Today, there’s a lot of gadgets to look forward to. But they all run on some sort of power. So, how are we going to power the homes of tomorrow?

Coal, oil and gas are having a bit of an image problem, and they’re not even going to be around forever for us to use. So what are we going to do? Wait for some more to be found, or make a change to a new level of technologies?

I vote for the second option, and the big name for other energy sources at the moment are renewables.

Renewables are sources of energy that don’t run out, and there are so many different types. There’s solar, geothermal, wind, wave and tidal, and even biomass.

Some of these options are way too big to ever work on just a single home, but some of these renewable sources can be used on a much smaller scale. This means that you could heat up your home and charge all your new electronics without having to rely on the big energy firms.

Let’s take a look at the best choice for renewable home energy.

Solar Power

The UK isn’t exactly the most sunny country in the world, but don’t count out solar panels as an option to power your home of tomorrow. They actually work even when it’s cloudy outside!

Most people think that there’s only one type of panel, but there’s actually two: solar thermal and photovaltaic. The main difference between the two types is how they use sunlight to work. Solar thermal panels use the suns energy to create heat, which then powers a generator to make electricity, whereas photovaltaic directly converts the suns rays into electricity.

There’s already over 500,000 homes in the UK that have solar panels on their roofs, and if they create any energy that you don’t use, it gets fed back into the national grid. The government introduced the Feed-In Tariff schemes (FITS) a few years ago, which means that you get paid for the energy that you put into the national grid.

According to Which?, the Feed-In Tariff scheme will give a household nearly £600 pounds a year on average for the extra power that they generate.

Solar panels certainly look like their going to be a big part of our future, they certainly are an investment, but for more and more people, it’s the way to go for powering their homes of tomorrow.

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Save On Your Heating Bills with “Cosy” App

You’ve just finished work, you check your phone for texts and Facebook and then you turn you heating on in your house ready for when you get home. With the “Cosy” heating app you get to save money and control the heating whenever you want.

A Kickstarter appeal is requesting backing to be able to change the way we heat our homes. By using an app that will allow you to control how warm your house when you are in any part of the world, you may never need to worry about frozen pipes again. The idea of getting home to a freezing house and staying in your gloves, scarfs and coats just waiting to warm up so that you can save a few, very crucial, pennies will be a thing of the past.

Green Energy Options, GEO, hope to help people not only find heating their home when they need it much easier, but also to lower emissions to the environment and to help to lower your bills at the same time.

Chief Strategy Officer, Simon Anderson said: “Boiler controls are notoriously unfriendly so many people set a programme and leave it regardless if they are at home or not. Few, if any of us, know how much it costs to have your heating on for an hour. Assuming that an average gas bill is about £800, and probably about £500 of this is for central heating, every 10% that you could reduce the number of hours you are heating your house unnecessarily, could save you approximately £50.”

The idea is that rather than having the heating on a timer over the day, estimating when you will get home, you can just turn it on by the mobile app that links to your home when you know that you are leaving. This would mean that if you finish work and fancy going to the pub for a couple of drinks, then you don’t need to worry that the heating is going to waste.

At this point in time they are still applying on Kickstarter for £20,000 so that they can include into the function the ability to turn lights on and off too. “We are a small business and the amount that we can develop at each step is constrained by the revenues we generate.” Simon said. “If we are able to raise additional funding through kickstarter then we can add more features and get a better product to market faster to compete with the big guys like British Gas’s Hive.”

The first stage of the product will be release toward the end of April as a tester and Release Two of the product should be available in Autumn this year at a cost of around £250.

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Fridges – More Than Just Fresh Food

There’s no more milk in the fridge. It’s the problem that we’ve all had to face and there’s only two options: either you go out and buy more or you go without. Wouldn’t it just be easier if the fridge could fill itself?

Well, two years ago LG unveiled their new ‘smart fridge‘ at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it retails here for around £2000 and includes a LCD touchscreen and internet connection to download new recipes based on the contents inside it.

The idea is that when you’ve bought some food, you scan in the barcodes using the scanner on the front door or describe the product to the fridge using the voice recognition technology. The fridge then keeps track of the freshness and amount of food remaining in the fridge. So, if you’re running low on milk, the fridge can use the internet to order more milk for you from websites such as Ocado. If you select a recipe that it suggests, it once again uses the internet to turn on your oven to the correct temperature and time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJSYkGHhHnE

For £2000, there’s definitely a lot of technology for the money, but there could be problems. The first is that you will have to buy more of LG’s smart technology to work with the fridge, which ups the cost. The second is that some people may not appreciate a fridge that gives you so much information, they may just want a box that keeps the food cool and fresh.

This fridge does look like recognisable as the a future part of our kitchens. But Electrolux, another big firm, has ideas that are slightly more out of the box.

Every year, Electrolux runs the Electrolux Design Lab competition, where people can send in their ideas for the technology of tomorrow. In 2010, one of their finalists was the Bio Robot Refrigerator, designed by Yuriy Dmitriev. Instead of a cool box to store your food, the fridge is filled with a gel containing bio nano robots. You insert the food into the gel which creates an airtight pocket around it, the bio nano robots then absorb the heat from the food and emit it in a form of bioluminescence.

This last idea is still a prototype at the moment, but one day in the far future, fridges like these could be a reality. As for now, internet fridges may be making their way towards your kitchen.

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