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Aside from the hefty upfront and maintenance costs associated with rooftop panels, whether it is of your house or your enclosed patio, there is another thing deterring a shift to the massive adoption of solar energy — the lack of aesthetic quality in most PV panels.
People who are consciously maintaining a certain theme or look for their homes find traditional rooftop panels somewhat of an eyesore. You might think this is a rather shallow reason for refusing to go solar, but how would you feel if you spent all your life savings trying to achieve your dream home only for that vision to be ruined by the sight of solar panels.
Fortunately, there are still some ways you can take advantage of clean and renewable solar power without ruining your home’s aesthetic by installing solar panels on the roof.
Solar Lighting
If you’re not keen on having solar panels powering off all the appliances in your home, then at least you can have renewable solar energy running your outdoor appliances that are under direct sunlight anyway.
Outdoor solar lights are not only good for the environment — if you pick the right ones, they could be really amazing for your home’s aesthetic, too. These lights are pretty easy to install, and most of them have smart functions like automatically turning on at night and turning off again in the morning. If they get charged for the entire day, they can provide sufficient lighting throughout the night.
Another outdoor appliance that can be solar-powered is your home’s security cameras.
Other Solar-Powered Furniture
Apart from lights, you could also go for solar-powered fans and maybe even some solar gadget chargers. Other small-ticket items like calculators and watches can be solar-powered, too. When it comes to things like pivoting towards a more sustainable power source, every little thing counts so you could just start small and be surprised at the wonders of sustainable living.
This way, you can still have your fair share of renewable solar energy without ruining any part of your home’s aesthetic quality.
Ground Mounted Panels
As mentioned earlier, every small effort counts, but if you do want to ramp things up by powering bigger appliances in your home using solar energy, you’re really going to need some panels. If you still don’t want them ruining the aesthetic of your roof, you can instead install panels on the ground, especially if you have enough ground area for it.
Just make sure that sunlight can still access your panels if you do decide to have them on the ground. But unfortunately, you have to have a pretty huge place to be able to hide these ‘unaesthetic’ panels from plain view if you really don’t like how they look.
Community Solar
There is yet another way you can choose solar without having any sort of panels at home. You can do so by subscribing to a community solar project. In some places, the idea of a shared solar program is fairly new but it is quickly gaining ground as a mainstream way to use generated solar power at home.
A community solar setup is not entirely panel-free. It’s just that the panels will be erected somewhere that is not your home. They will be installed in a remote location where the solar company will oversee the power generation and its distribution to the program’s subscribers.
If you were to become one of these subscribers, you’d be entitled to enjoy the benefits of solar power without sacrificing the aesthetic quality of your home. In fact, you wouldn’t have to install anything new just to have your community solar power subscription activated. There won’t be any panels or unsightly wires getting in the way of your house’s design flow, since your connection to the solar grid will be purely digital. You will receive your bill credits through a virtual net metering system — so you don’t even have to make space for a separate power bill to make shared solar work.
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