By using solar power you can cut your energy costs by 40 to 80 percent. Are you looking to boost the value of your home, or to cut your energy costs? One way to do this is to look into solar energy systems or wind turbine systems. These are all forms of alternative energy and form a distributional model, and they’re worthwhile investments in home improvements, and often eligible for alternative and renewable energy credits.

How much can you save on investing in solar power to cut your energy costs? Well, the break even point for most solar home power systems is 40% – that means that the solar system has to generate 40% of the household’s total energy needs. To hit this number, you need to do a home energy audit, and then look seriously at the kind of solar power systems you want to use.

Home energy audits generate a report on how much power your home uses, and good ones will break this down hour by hour and day by day, to tell you when your peak energy usage is. By tracking this to what you’re actually using, you can identify what’s consuming the most energy in your home, and what you can target with solar power systems.

For example, most American homes have two places where a little effort can cut your energy costs. Heating water, and air conditioning in the summer. Making hot water is a prime candidate for cutting your energy costs by solar power, because the sun’s energy comes in the form of heat – and making a solar collector that can heat up water in pipes and then use that to store the hot water under the house lets the hot water serve as thermal ballast for a home heating system, and cuts down the number one source of energy consumption in the home.

More exotic systems use solar heating to run the hot end of a heat pump chiller; this uses a solar collector as a heat box to heat up a working fluid to work just like an air conditioner. These systems are harder to retrofit to an existing house, but can be done – and they’re a great addition to a new home building plan, because of how they work – they cool the house when they’re hit with direct sunlight, which makes slashes your energy usage when you need it the most.

There’s a lot more to solar power here – you can reduce the amount of solar energy needed (or increase the percentage of the home power budget created by solar power) by doing other home improvements like improving attic insulation, and there are concerns for things like storing power in battery arrays or thermal mass to consider, but if you’re looking to slash your energy costs, looking into alternative renewable energy sources like solar power are one of the first things you should consider.