DIY Solar - Spam or the Real Thing?

by Deb Powers

Bill Ford must love me. No, really. I get half a dozen emails a day from Bill Ford ordering me to stop paying my electric bill. Well, that's what the subject line is anyway. Inside, I find out that what he really wants is to tell me how to lower my electric bill to $0.00. In fact, he'll tell me how to make the electric company pay me instead. Isn't that nice of him?

I've got to tell you, though - I've got my doubts. It's really hard to take the guy seriously when he (and his hundreds of affiliate marketers) spam-bomb my mailbox daily with promises to show me the secret of making the utility companies send me money every month.

It's not that I don't know how possible that is - I have friends who generate their own electricity and sell back their surplus generation. I know a number of towns that are looking at solar installations on public buildings like schools as a way to generate electricity, reduce their grid energy consumption, and offset the costs of the electricity they buy for other buildings with payments from excess electricity generation.

It's not even that I have an inherent bias against DIY projects, or believe that pro is always better. I upcycle, recycle, reuse, repurpose and rebuild. I've cooked meals using only the sun, and grew up taking showers with solar-heated water at the summer cottage before it was winterized and a hot water tank was added. I love DIY. I love saving money. I love cool gadgets that I make for next-to-nothing when other people are laying out hundreds of buckaroos for a cool gadget that does the same thing. So Bill Ford's promise to show me how to stick it to the electric company should be right up my alley, right?

Except. As a person who makes a living writing web content, I have an innate distrust of anyone selling an ebook with one of those cheesy form sales letters. And if you click on the link in that "Never Pay Another Electric Bill!" email, that's exactly what you get - a cheesy sales letter that was written by someone using a formula that's "guaranteed to convert sales". In other words, it's designed to suck you in and make you pay Bill Ford $47 for a 40 page ebook telling you how to make BOTH your own solar panels AND your own wind generators - for less than $200 each.

There are a few other DIY solar generation ebooks out there as well, but none of them are marketed with the intensity and tactics that Bill Ford's book uses. He's even covered the negative market. Do a search for "Bill Ford scam" and you'll get page after page of search results leading to identical "reviews" of his ebook that say - Wow! I thought this was a scam until I bought the book and tried it out, and hey, it really does work!

I can understand the draw - who wouldn't want to learn how to build your own $200 system when the cost of a profesionally installed system runs between $10,000 and $35,000? But there are other ways and places to learn how to do it - like your local library or book store, where you'll get a whole lot more for your money - and pay a whole lot less for it.

If you're thinking of generating your own electricity - either off-grid or on-grid, a good place to start gathering information is at the U.S. Dept of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Energy Savers page. It won't give you a blue print for creating your own PV cells or solar cell array, and it won't give you schematics for hooking up your home-built wind turbine to your electrical system, but it will give you a pretty basic overview of the things you need to know and to consider before you choose an alternative energy system for your home.

You'll also find lots of important-to-know information at Cooler Planet, which admittedly has a strong pro installation bias - but then, so do most of the government and utility company incentive programs.

Before you plunk down $47 for a 40 page "solar power manual", take the time to do some free research online and off. Talk with a pro - you don't have to pay them a cent to ask a few questions. Talk with your electricity supplier. Read up on the subject in as many places as you can, then make an informed decision on what kind of renewable energy is best for your home... and realistically assess whether it's a doable DIY project for your knowledge and skill level.