3 Things Around The House You Didn’t Know Could Be Solar Powered

In the spirit of being environmentally conscious, every year thousands of people install solar energy panels to their home to help make their energy consumption more ‘green’. But installing large solar panels can often be a costly endeavour, so with that in mind, what items around the house can be upgraded to work on solar power without you having to install large panels on your house.

1. Your Mobile Phone

Starting off with a simple item, mobile phones, everyone has one and we constantly use them, according to Forbes if one person fully charges their phone every day that will use roughly 2,000 watt hours across a year, so in a house with multiple phone users you can see a large amount of electricity being used. Even more, when you weigh in other small electronics like iPads that figure will certainly be higher.

So, you can use solar power to help you make your consumption more green simply by investing in either a solar powered battery bank to charge your electronics or a solar phone case. A solar powered battery bank will simply need to be left in the sunlight during the day and used to charge your devices at night and the solar cases will charge your phone whilst the panels are exposed to sunlight, meaning that just by leaving your phone in the sun for a few minutes can help charge you back up.

• Your Blinds

This entry may be a bit of a surprise for you, most often when you think of blinds they’ll be operated by a chain or a crank, but with evolution of modern tech electronic motorised window blinds controlled remotely are a reality. Primarily intended for smart home integration or for those with mobility issues these electric blinds will still use up some energy when being used.

But many retailers that manufacture and sell these new electric blinds have been thinking about the environment when designing these blinds as many listings for electric blinds have the option to add a solar panel to the blinds mechanism which will charge the battery with sunlight so that you don’t need to use your mains electricity to get your blinds working.

• Your Kettle

In British homes, kettles are an essential, pretty much every house in the country has a kettle in the kitchen. This would all be fine if kettles weren’t so inefficient when it comes to their electricity use. According to NPower the average kettle uses 0.1kWh to come to the boil, this doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the UK has 100million cups of tea a day, so that’s lots of energy being used by kettles to support the UK’s tea habit.

This is where solar power comes into play, various companies have created solar powered kettles that are powered 100% by sunlight, these solar kettles are often more efficient than mains powered kettles meaning that you’ll use less energy getting your cup of tea and the energy you do use will be greener.