A few years ago, I started looking into solar energy. Just like you, I started with an online search exploring on how I could save money with solar electricity. I was shocked to see how much it cost to have solar panels installed at my house! The estimate I received was over $35,000 and the payback time for that was just way too long. I certainly didn’t have that kind of money, not even close. I was resigned to the idea of paying the electric company each and every month until I met a friend who had a solution. My friend explained that he was building his own solar panels for just a fraction of the cost of new retail solar panels. For more info on Green DIY Energy, click on the images above and below.

Travellers face mass eviction at Dale Farm. Half the community at Dale Farm in Essex have been told they’re living there illegally because they don’t have planning permission. They say they’ve got nowhere else to go – and are refusing to leave. The council expect the cost of policing the eviction could be more than £18million. Soon after the end of August Basildon Council‘s bailiffs will move in for what has been called the biggest single eviction in peacetime Britain. The folk who live at the farm are Irish travellers. Around eighty of their caravans are set to be forcibly cleared off the site. Around 400 people at Dale Farm don’t know how much longer they’ll keep their homes. But the people who live on this site aren’t squatters. They own the land here, the problem the council has with them is that they don’t have planning permission to live on it. Of course, the travellers here say that’s because the council won’t give them planning permission. There may be a certain irony about a group of travellers who are refusing to budge. But many now appreciate the benefits of a settled life. Six-year-old Jimmy-Tom Sheridan goes to school and is learning to read, which is progress for the family. His mum Nora didn’t go to school and can’t read. Some have been offered council housing but the travellers don’t want their community broken up and many don’t want to live in houses anyway. That’s always been hard for settled communities to understand. The Conservative led council insist …