Solar Energy is Great for the Philippines

09/11/2025

https://youtube.com/shorts/wTmt76M4tgA?si=zEpgX3SgKM1pbFAJ

Hi, I’m Lanie — a lawyer, entrepreneur, and mum living in the UK. Like many of you, I’m a second-generation Filipino who had to figure out life in a foreign ...

08/09/2025

Moving day, more mess to organize.

11/01/2021

Our Solar Pool: Part 5 : Support after buying solar equipment.

This post is to commend the supplier of our solar pool equipment. But first I'll review the prior posts that you might want to review.

Starting on September 27, I posted about "Our Solar Pool: Part 1" telling how we estimated the money that we could save.

Part 2 described "our system."

Part 3 described how we identified a supplier that seemed "safe." By "safe" I mean one that sold products of acceptable quality and provided reasonable support after making the sale.

We felt comfortable with Solazone Philippines Corporation and Solazone Australia

In Part 4 we discussed "Sizing the Panels" and recommended over-sizing PV panels because manufacturers may be tempted to pump up sales by specifying stingy power requirements. We also shared photos and videos.

This is now the post for Solar Pool: Part 5: A commendation of Solazone for after-sale support.

A part of our solar water pump failed and Solazone supported us by obtaining 2 replacement parts from the manufacturer. That might seem insignificant, but it is important because Chinese manufacturers tend to prioritize big sales to their foreign dealers and treat after-sale support as a reluctant service to dealers.

I commend Solazone for overcoming that inertia to obtain our parts.

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24/11/2020

The Payback Time for Solar Energy

Part 1: Introduction to a Simple Calculator

I like to observe that “it ain’t rocket science” so we start simple and will complicate things a bit more in later posts.

The images with this post are screenshots of a simple spreadsheet I used for the solar system powering our swimming pool. Later on, I hope to share a spreadsheet that you can try out for your own projects. But beware that any simple estimate of payback time will be less than perfectly realistic. I can complicate things later on if there is interest.

The images show 3 sheets: one for the data, another showing the calculations using the data, and the third with the payback time in years. Please feel free to ignore the calculations if not interested in the details.

The Data Sheet has information about the

Load (a water pump in our case)

Cost of electricity from a public utility (ours is Akelco)

Cost of solar panels

Cost of other equipment required by the solar system

We assume that the pool pumps water for 10 hours a day. You might assume 24 hours if your load is a refrigerator or any other number of hours that fits your situation.

I give you the option to specify the watts of power needed by the load if you know that. Please enter 0 if you don’t know.

Or you can use a clamp meter to measure the current in amperes now being used by your load. Please enter 0 if you didn’t measure the current.

If you are like me, you had no clue what you were paying for your power. We would just complain and pay.

This sheet asks you for your monthly bill in PHP and the amount of power that you used in kWh or kilowatt hours. A kilowatt is shorthand for 1000 watts. And a kWh is a 1000 watt load used for one hour. The Calculations Sheet will determine what you pay per kWh. Hint: it’s costly compared to other countries.

The other data are self explanatory and consist of the costs of solar panels and other equipment needed for the solar system.

The Calculations Sheet puts the data into a form for easily determining the years that will be needed to pay back the cost of the investment in solar energy. I hope the comments in that sheet are self explanatory. If not, please feel free to fire off questions and I’ll explain more completely.

The Payoff Sheet is the simplest of all. The “bottom line” is the payoff time in years. This Payoff is calculated as the cost of the solar equipment divided by the yearly cost to run the load without solar energy.

Some Observations and Conclusions

The Data Sheet omits the cost of installation partly to keep things simple and also because our installation was not expensive. We hired some help by the day and did not use costly materials. We did not contract with a company wanting to make a generous profit on our project. You may or may not want to take a similar DIY approach to solar energy.

The costs of panels have come down markedly in the last 2 years so you might ask “should I have waited to buy rather than buying in 2018?” I’m happy we did not wait because we could not have known if panel cost would increase or decrease and because we unnecessarily would have wasted PHP 71,766 to buy power from Akelco.

Please check back for more posts about a simple approach to solar Payback.

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Thank you.

21/11/2020

Pinoy student wins international engineering, design prize

A novel material made from rotting fruit and vegetables that absorbs stray ultraviolet light from the sun and converts it into renewable energy has landed its designer the first sustainability gong in this year’s James Dyson awards.

This headline is something that seems too good to be true so I checked it out by going direct to the James Dyson Award website
www.jamesdysonaward.org

The award appears to be legitimate so the awardee and all Filipinos should be proud.

Go here for the complete story:
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2020/11/20/2058171/pinoy-student-wins-international-engineering-design-prize

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04/11/2020

Free Christmas cheer with help from my lovely wife and solar energy.

Use of the word "free" needs some qualification because our solar energy is free AFTER buying some equipment -- not totally "free. But that's still very good.

This scene was triply illuminated by solar power.

First, the bahay kubo was lighted by an LED in the ceiling.

Second, the Christmas lights were illuminated by a small solar cell with a battery. Note that we could have gotten 300 LEDs for the same price instead of only 100 LEDs if we had bought the 12V light string without the solar cell and battery.

Third, the photo was illuminated by a flash from my phone, and the phone was charged by solar power. This is true whether or not my claim seems like a "stretch" to you.

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02/11/2020

Solar energy goes well with gardening -- even after Typhoon Rolly

The path of the eye was forecast to pass close to us so we were fearful. And we were warned by Signal 2. Fortunately the wind was not bad and all the panels and plants survived.

My Love is not displaying her green thumb in these photos but it's always present.

BTW one photo shows a partial view of a 2nd solar farm (on top right). That one is for the solar water pump for the swimming pool as already described with several of our first posts.

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31/10/2020

Solar energy goes well with gardening

This post started with my wife lamenting that she had no more room for planting. I remembered reading research about opportunities to combine solar “farms” with traditional agriculture. So I suggested to my Love that she might consider planting under our panels that power the hybrid air conditioner.

She did so you can see photos of her with her prolific green thumb, a wide array of plants, and shading by solar panels.

Stop by later for an update after there has been time for the plants to thrive under solar power.s

Here’s reference to the research on solar agriculture:
https://www.treehugger.com/agrivoltaics-solar-power-crops-bees-4863595

I have every confidence that my wife will demonstrate the opportunity for gardening under solar panels in the Philippines.

This also will mean that many hotels with rooftop restaurants could combine dining with growing FRESH vegetables and herbs for their customers. Anyone with a flat roof could do the same.

(We are posting while hunkering down and waiting for Typhoon Rolly. Let’s hope for it to suddenly dissipate!)

Please share this post and come back later to see how my wife’s plants have thrived under solar panels. I have no doubts that they will thrive.

30/10/2020

Cheapo Solar Hot Tub

A dear friend told me of his dream to luxuriate every day while bathing in a hot tub. He has a home-made concrete tub and has an ample supply of COLD water. But he could only boil water to warm the water in his tub. Far from ideal!

The design in this post is nearly free and will allow him to realize his dream.

We will snake or coil a garden hose on the hot steel roof and use one (or more) of these old aquarium water pumps to circulate the water from the tub to the roof for warming and then return the water to the tub. The tub water will get a little hotter every minute that the water circulates while the sun shines.

My friend will be able to enjoy his daily bath at any time AFTER the water has reached his ideal temperature. He will have to forego obsessive-compulsive scheduling of a bath by the clock because this design only supports bathing by the sun = sunbathing au natural !!!

This design has not yet been tested but how could it not work? The only question is whether or not my old pumps still function and if they will be powerful enough for the job. If not, we will need a new bigger water pump, but that would be a small one-time expenditure and be cheap compared to the cost of heating water in any other way.

Be sure not to miss our post after the hot tub has been put into operation.

For now, please share this post because the idea is AFFORDABLE and practical.

Thank you.

28/10/2020

A better cheap solar water heater

I actually built and used this DIY heater made mostly from re-purposed equipment. The design could be improved but it worked well and was very inexpensive.

Recall my prior post of a least-cost system consisting of nothing more than a garden hose?

This improved design starts with the same garden hose on a hot roof but adds a pump to circulate the water into a water tank.

I used half of a 55 gal steel drum but would use plastic instead if I were to replace my old drum.

The hot water in the tank got to our shower by adding a copper coil. Cold water from our pressurized water system fed into the copper coil, got hot, and eventually was piped to our showers and washing machine. The hot water tank and the copper coil acted as an improvised heat exchanger.

I'm using past tense because the steel drum eventually rusted out and I've not yet replaced it with a stainless or plastic tank.

This heater was better than the simple garden-hose system because it gave us lots of hot water and the water stayed hot to enjoy showers in the evening hours after the sun went down and the hot roof cooled.

The system was cheap to build by re-purposing a used 55 gal drum, buying a copper coil in a junk shop, and using an aquarium water pump. The cost was much closer to PHP 0.00 than to the PHP 30,000 cost of a commercial solar water heater!

This is actually affordable, practical, and useful so please share this post.

Thank you.

27/10/2020

A cheapo DIY solar water heater made with a garden hose.

It's so easy I'm almost ashamed to post this. You just connect a garden hose to a faucet with water and snake or coil the hose around a hot roof. Then the water coming out of the hose will be heated by the sun and by the roof. Add a shower spray to the other end of the hose or keep it simple by using your finger or thumb.

The hose pictured is black to aid absorption of the sun's rays but that's not critical.

There are lots of other ways to use the sun to warm water cheaply and easily but this one is a winner.

My first solar project was a slightly more sophisticated water heater that I'll describe in my next post. That DIY project mostly re-used supplies laying around the house or bought inexpensively in a junk shop.

A commercial solar water heater would cost about P30,000 or $600. And most commercial units are not pressurized so you need gravity feed.

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