Discussion

Research

           When I was looking through all the different websites, magazines, reference books, and books about solar energy I found many different and interesting facts. Solar energy is the most amazing source of energy because it is free. It is not renewable; however, the great thing is that the sun never ever runs out of energy to give to Earth and all of its other planets. The sun has so much more energy than all of the Earth’s energy resources put together. For example, if you put all of the energy of the earth together and multiplied it by five, you still would not have even close to the same amount of energy the sun has.

          Solar energy is neither wasted nor taken up by harvesting, nor is it limited to harvesting. “The amount of energy we use to day in no way diminishes how much we use tomorrow, or how much is left for our children and grandchildren.” This is a true fact stated by Ewing and Pratt, page 15. So much energy from the sun falls to the earth each day; that from one day we would have enough energy for four or five years. Solar energy will not raise your bill; however, it will shrink your bill each and every month. Also, the energy that you will get, will pay it self off. You will never regret installing your solar collectors for financial and heating reasons that are non wasteful.

            The suns energy is never ending. The sun will not start running out of energy for over several trillion years from now, and even then, the sun will not be completely out of energy. This tells us that the sun is not at all like oil or coal, or any other resource that we have on Earth, not even our water energy resource. Some ways that we can use this energy is by heating up our house water or pools with the sun. I also found that you can use your solar energy collector to cool your house during the summer at night. We should not let the amazing energy source and  opportunity of using this energy pass us up.

            One bad thing about solar energy is that our way of collecting and using it is very expensive. This is so because even though the sun gives out free energy, we need to find better ways to collect and use it because our current way is expensive. However, in the long run, the expensive construction and installation could easily end up paying off in the long run. You could save hundreds to thousands of dollars over a life time. (Schaeffer p. 360)

            The sun is spectacular in so many ways. You can use it for sun tanning all the way to heating up your pool or your hot water for your showers. The suns energy is endless so use it up as much as you want!!!

Analysis

            After performing my experiment many times, over and over again, I observed a couple of different things. First I saw after comparing the different temperatures at the same time between the blue and the pink that the pink solar collector heated up slower. The blue solar collector heated up faster than the pink one; however, it was not that much difference between the two collectors. The blue was only hotter by about two degrees during the same time period. Thus, my hypothesis was correct that the blue solar collector would heat up faster than the pink.

            Another thing that I observed was that the pink solar collector would increase its temperature evenly. For example, the pink went from 65 degrees to 67 to 69 to 71. However, the blue went from 65 degrees to 70 to 76 to 80. Whereas the blue would go up very high then it would go up by just a couple of degrees. I think that this is so because since the blue is more sensitive to the sun, it would be more affected by the sun either being behind a cloud or behind a building for a couple of minutes.

            If I could do this experiment over again I might change a couple of things, but not very many. First I would make sure that I do the experiments at the exact same time of day each and every time. Second I would make sure that the sun was ALWAYS on the solar collectors. Finally, I would cover the bucket of water when I did the experiments. This is my analysis of my solar collector experiments.