If you’ve thinking about building a green home or greening your current place with green building products, you’ve no doubt thought about alternative energy methods. And the idea of powering your home with solar power has probably crossed your mind. But there are a lot of things to consider using green building products. You’ll have to figure out how much sunlight your house receives. And when using green building products, you’ll have to find the best place for solar panels. And you’ll have to figure out if the payoff in solar energy and other green building products will even be worth the time and money that you’ll invest.
These are all important questions that anyone using green building products will have to face. And finding answers can be tricky. Fortunately, there’s a Web site called Roof Ray that can help you when you’re using green building products. An inspired utilization of Google Maps, Roof Ray can help you figure out where to best place your solar panels when you’re starting a project using green building products.
After registering for a free account, you’ll be asked to find your house on Google Maps. Enter your address and you’ll get a satellite view of your home, or where you’re building a green home. You’ll get the option to create an array (on your roof, on your lawn, wherever you want), that you plan to cover with solar panels. Once you have your potential solar spot drawn over your house or on the plot where you plan on building a green home, you can get an estimate of how much power per square feet your green building products will generate. And you’ll get projected peak power output from those green building products.
If you’re just rehabbing your house with green building products, and if you have your electrical bill on hand, you can also enter your average monthly bill and Roof Ray can estimate how much you’ll save each month (if you want to be even more accurate, you can enter the amount of kilowatts you consumed each hour, as well).
You’ll get a calculation of how much money these green building products can save you monthly and yearly. Finally, Roof Ray can also calculate the cost of buying and installing panels when you’re building a green home. It will even factor in any rebates available for using green building products from the state and local government.
Of course, Roof Ray is just an educated guess. But if you’re seriously considering using green building products, but are not sure where to start, planning your solar panels on Roof Ray is a great way to begin.
