I have a home made LED lamp now as my main source of light in the living room. I designed it to fit a normal light bulb socket. It is running off my solar battery pack through an inverter.

The great thing about this LED bulb is that there are no resistors used at all. That means no waste energy. I used 60 LEDs, a bridge rectifier and a capacitor. All energy is used for light output. Most LED bulbs you can buy in stores use a resistor for every LED to reduce the amount of current. I just divided the amount of current with LEDs themselves.

You can see details on how to make one at:

http://www.metwebsites.com/wwr&d/LEDs.html

The total power consumption for this lamp is about 4 watts.

I just moved to the country!

Now I can put my solar panels outside in the full sunlight and really begin testing. I had to have them in my sliding glass doors because my landlord would not allow me to put them outside anywhere.

Well, now I have an apartment on 1.5 acres of free, wild land in the mountains. When I get a warmer day, the panels are going outside in the full sun. I will set up sunlight tracking systems for maximum energy output during the daylight hours.

I was only getting some light directly on the panels during the mid day in my old place. This provided enough energy to power a couple energy efficient lights and my netbook in the evenings.

With solar tracking, I should get about 870 watt hours of energy during the ten hour long winter days and up to 1300 watts during the summer months.

I have an idea to increase the energy output even more. If you look up "Bedini Motor" or "SSG" on the internet, you will find a sort of "free" energy generator. It takes a small amount of energy to run it and puts out larger amounts of energy into batteries. I have been experimenting with this idea for a few years now and may try using solar energy to power the Bedini motor, which will charge batteries.

Above is a picture of a roller skate wheel generating electricity using the Bedini concept.