David Knight Review

Renewable energy is attracting a lot of attention these days. That’s especially true of renewable energy systems you can build for your own home: solar panels on the roof, your own wind turbines, biodiesel fuel powering a generator.

As the price of conventional electricity rises while that of solar and wind power fall, the savings from generating your own renewable energy are becoming more and more substantial, and join together with the environmental benefits of renewable energy over fossil fuels.

A lot of e-books, films and other material is available online these days to show you how to build your own renewable energy system. If you’re willing to put in a bit of time and effort, there’s no need to spend thousands of dollars having a contractor install a system for you, and you can even save money compared to what you would spend for a kit that lets you install the system yourself.

David Knight, the developer of DIY Power System (which you can find at www.diypowersystem.com) has an interesting variation on the theme.

From his e-books, you can learn not only how to build your own solar panel, wind generator, battery storage system, and biodiesel fuel, but even how to build your own house!

All five of these books are available from his website for a total of $97, with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a few extra freebies thrown in.

The first two books of the five (Build Your Own Solar Generator and Build Your Own Wind Turbine) give you the knowledge to construct the most essential components of any home renewable energy system: the thing that actually generates the power, whether in the form of solar panels on the roof, or of wind turbines atop towers to catch the wind.

The first book also goes into the theory of the photovoltaic effect and how solar power actually works to convert sunlight into electricity.

The third book, Build Your Own Batteries, is something you don’t see a lot of online (whereas there are several sites that can provide information on how to make solar panels and wind turbines).

An off-grid solar or wind system does need batteries for storing power, since the times of peak energy production are unlikely to also be the times when your electricity use is highest, so in one way or another you will need to store the excess electricity for later use.

The other method besides batteries is to use a grid-tie connection and net metering, which “sells” your excess power to the utility for a credit, which you then use to buy electricity –– this is an “on-grid” system and still leaves you somewhat connected to the power company; if you don’t want that, you will definitely need storage batteries. Build Your Own Batteries offers knowledge of how to construct your own storage batteries rather than buying them.

The fourth book, Make Your Own Biodiesel, shows how you can produce an equivalent to diesel fuel from waste vegetable oil. You can get waste oil for free from restaurants; they would otherwise have to dispose of it in ways that would probably cost them money, so they’ll be happy to let you take it off their hands most of the time.

This waste oil can be processed to yield a type of fuel similar to diesel oil, which can be used in any car or truck with a diesel engine or to power an oil furnace. It’s a type of renewable energy because, unlike true diesel fuel, it’s not made from petroleum but rather from plant sources.

Knight’s fifth book really caught my eye. Instructions on how to build your own house aren’t found online every day! But he’s quite serious. This book will tell you how to acquire property, obtain permits and building materials, and by working part-time over a period of several months, build an actual house using nobody’s labor but your own.

Obviously that would save quite a bit of money, and even if you never decide to build your own home, the knowledge would surely come in handy for purposes of home repair or remodeling.