You will need foam insulation, 2 junk glass patio doors, about three cases worth of empty soda cans, black spraypaint, epoxy, caulk, dryer hose, plywood the size of the patio doors, and a thermostat-controlled fan.

Cut a hole in the plywood the same diameter as the dryer hose. Spray one side of the plywood black. Cut tops off soda cans, epoxy to plywood. The cans should touch at the sides and completely cover the wood. Spray all cans black. Cut insulation to make "sides" of a box, a little taller than the soda cans on all four sides of the plywood. Seal patio doors to the insulation "sides" after installing thermostat on the patio doors. Run dryer hose inside.

Make sure you put this in direct sunlight. The way it works is that the sunlight heats up the sprayed metal through the glass. As soon as it gets as hot as you’ve set the thermostat, the fan kicks on and blows hot air into the house until it cools off again. I know it sounds sort of MacGuyver crazy, but it kept my basement bedroom warm when I was a teenager. Good luck!

It costs approximately $24,000 to install a solar panel and battery kit this size with a 20 year warranty. If electricity costs continue to average $0.10 per kilowatt hour for the next 20 years, how many years will it take for such a system to pay for itself?

6,000 days = Just under 16 and a half years

Which is exactly why you don’t see millions of these installed all over the place – too expensive to be cost effective and that is without any maintenance costs.

But are there weights in the tips of the ‘windmill’ blades that keep them spinning?

Knowledgeable persons only, no rude responses or I’ll report you.

Centrifugal force is actually a detriment to a windmills efficiency. It forces engineers to make the pivots and blades heavier and more durable than actually needed for the intended purpose of the windmill. This is necessary to provide the strength to withstand the centrifugal forces on the spinning blades.

The blades work on the same principal as an airplane wing, except instead of the low pressure on top of the airplane’s wing providing an upward force or lift, the low pressure areas on the windmill blades provide a sideways force which causes the blade to rotate.
Any weights on the blades are for balance to minimize vibration and to ensure a long and dependable service life.
The wind, as you stated in your question, is surely what keeps them spinning, the weights add a certain amount of inertia between wind gusts, but that is not their primary purpose. The more weight, the more wind energy it takes to get them spinning up and performing their function inside the mill.

But are there weights in the tips of the ‘windmill’ blades that keep them spinning?

Knowledgeable persons only, no rude responses or I’ll report you.

Centrifugal force is actually a detriment to a windmills efficiency. It forces engineers to make the pivots and blades heavier and more durable than actually needed for the intended purpose of the windmill. This is necessary to provide the strength to withstand the centrifugal forces on the spinning blades.

The blades work on the same principal as an airplane wing, except instead of the low pressure on top of the airplane’s wing providing an upward force or lift, the low pressure areas on the windmill blades provide a sideways force which causes the blade to rotate.
Any weights on the blades are for balance to minimize vibration and to ensure a long and dependable service life.
The wind, as you stated in your question, is surely what keeps them spinning, the weights add a certain amount of inertia between wind gusts, but that is not their primary purpose. The more weight, the more wind energy it takes to get them spinning up and performing their function inside the mill.

Solar electric is generally a large ($10k or more) up-front investment, and a cost savings over time, as well as environmental benefit. And in many areas, it would never recover its initial investment, not at today’s prices. Costs continue to fall, though.

The internet is full of sites that suggest you can power your whole house with just $200 or less of homemade panels. As to the information, you could probably find it through a bittorrent search site, by looking for "solar panel", and would see that the kind of information being sold is not practical at all. See http://www.nlcpr.com/Deceptions6.php for a rebuttal to these scams.

You could build your own solar water heater, and plans will come up in Google.

As each cell fragment could have very different voltage and current characteristics, you have to manually measure the voltage and current characteristics, sort them and then wire them in parallel or in serial to achieve the desired voltage and current characteristics for the panel. Wiring in parallel increases the current while wiring in series increases the voltage, the current capacity of cells in series will be that of the lowest current capacity cell in that series hence you need to match fragments up to wire in parallel till you have enough current capacity to participate as a cell in the series. Cell fragments can only be wired in parallel if they have the same voltage output. It’s painstaking work and it’s difficult to place all the irregular shaped cells onto the solar panel in a layout that efficiently uses the space so your solar panels will likely be much larger than commercial ones. You could augment them with Fresnel lenses since the cells don’t occupy as much of the available surface area hence focusing the light onto the cells rather than the board will help with efficiency. Practice your soldering skills cause you don’t want to have to go back in to figure out where that cold solder joint is. If you’re real lucky you can get a supply of blemished cells but the cheapest ones are the broken cells.

The car I have right now, is a total junk. It’s a gas and it’s totally sluggish, plus it’s old so it smells like shit.

I’m seriously thinking about buying an electric vehicle or a used hybrid so I can save up on some money. I’m totally broke and I’m unemployed most of the time. But I have ten or so grand I can spend from credit if I can put it into something as a callateral that I can show to the bank, which an electric or hybrid hevicle is perfect because it barely depreciated or at least depreciates a lot less that ICE cars. Plus me being broke doesn’t help at all with the gass prices, I can berely afford to drive at all with a car, but I can have an electric vehicle as long as it has some extra solar pannels and some extra batteries, which is ok for me in terms of finances because they will be covered by the low interest loan, easy money.

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The amount of money you have isn’t very much – and you might not be able to afford a used hybrid – but I can show you some electric vehicles you can afford.
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First, there’s the ZAP car. It costs $10000.
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http://www.zapworld.com//cars/xebra.asp

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The ZAP is a city car – it won’t do freeway speeds. If you need to do freeways, you might want a used or converted gas car – some of these cars can be had for less than $5000:
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http://www.grassrootsev.com/convert.htm

and

http://www.austinev.org/evtradinpost/

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These cars use lead-acid batteries – that’s the old battery technology, so you will only be able to drive about 50 miles between charges.
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solar panels cost thousands, but charging from the outlet isn’t very expensive. In fact, in my state (Michigan) the electric company has a special rate for electric cars – just 2 and 1/2 cents per kilowatt-hour. I drive about 1300 miles per month, and the electricity cost for my EV is only 8 dollars. In most gas cars, the gas for 1300 miles would cost nearly $250.
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If you do this, be sure to join an EV club to learn how to care for your vehicle. EVs are very reliable, and almost never break down. But you have to care for your batteries so they last a long time.
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