A glacier, known as the Trotting Glacier, melts more water in a day than NY City uses in a year and has receded 9 miles in 5 years. The proof is the ice core records that reflect both CO2 and temperature levels going back 650,000 years. Each fume from a smoke stack and combustion engine output contributes to the seventy million tons of CO2 that people release into the air every day. Reducing our CO2 levels is the only option for lowering the effect of releasing CO2 into our atmosphere.

Most family houses spend around a 3rd of their energy budget on heating water for daily uses.

Heating water for showers, baths, cleaning clothes and a number of other stuff is done by electricity or gas supplied by utility companies. However, the resources that are used to make this electricity or gas aren't replenish-able and are increasingly harder to find as more natural resources are used up. This makes it hard for the typical household client with electric and water bills that keep on increasing at very high figures. As carbon-based fuels get harder and harder to locate and extract, this will only continue. For almost one hundred years, a solar panel has been used to heat water.

The easier method of solar energy use available today is water heating through solar electricity. It is just a matter of harnessing the thermal rays of the sun and applying it to water.

The solar panel is called the flat plate collector and batch collector systems. Flat plate collectors are just a chain of pipes that are positioned in an area of the home that receives direct sunlight (often a southern exposure and fitted to the roof). Water is pushed through the pipes and heated by the warmth of the sun, which is different from the chain of chemical reaction. The pipes are constructed to soak up the most heat from the sun.

A solar panel batch collector system is a tank of water that has been altered to use the most of the energy from the sun. Surfaces that are black, which absorb the thermal energy, are included. The tank is located in an area that has a lot of sunlight and it is close to the house. The water supplied by either of these systems can then be used in the regular plumbing system of the house where it may be employed for common-or-garden use like showers, washing up the dishes and cooking. Buying and installing each system will cost a lot of money but the upkeep cost is low and the system will last anywhere from ten to twenty-five years.

It could take 5 to 7 years for you to recoup your money on purchase and installation, depending upon the amount of hot water you use and how effective your house is in storing hot water. You would also be doing your part in the reduction of the amount of greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere. These are just some of the advantages and disadvantages of solar power.