Solar-powered home

Jim and Mary Maginel's home is powered by solar panels that are set up beside the lake in front of their home.

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- Jim Maginel likes to think his solar-powered home is a glimpse into the future.

The surroundings at Maginel's rural Olive Branch home are peaceful. The house sits at the edge of a lake, and hundreds of large trees cover the ground.

It took 10 years for Jim Maginel and his wife, Mary, to finish constructing their three-story home. Two years ago, they finally got electricity -- thanks to the sun.

Last Wednesday, the couple baked sweet potatoes outside next to the lake in their Sun Oven -- a small box with a baking rack surrounded by reflective panels.

"We've been cooking with this for the past year," Jim said. "We have a regular stove inside, but on sunny days it's fun to use this."

The Maginels used a Sun Oven to bake sweet potatoes. The oven's temperature can reach 300 degrees. [Click to enlarge]

The Sun Oven works like a crockpot and takes a little longer to bake everything. When the sun shines bright in the sky -- like Wednesday -- the temperature in the Sun Oven can reach up to 300 degrees.

"I get a big kick out of it," Mary said about her nonconventional oven. "I always think, 'What can I cook in the Sun Oven today?' I've done everything from heating water for tea to making soup, cooking meat, baking brownies. We're still perfecting recipes, but it's a lot of fun."

About 100 feet away from the couple's home are 12 solar panels that are wired together. When the sun hits the panels, it's converted to DC electricity. The electricity runs through copper cables and into the Maginels' basement.

Inside the home is an inverter that creates AC electricity and from there, the electricity goes into a circuit panel creating electricity to power the couple's lights, refrigerator, microwave and bread maker.

The solar panels are adjustable and need to be turned at different angles during each season as sun moves higher or lower in the sky.

Even at night or if the sun doesn't shine for a few days, the Maginels still have electricity. The extra power is stored in about 10 batteries, which provide at least 10 days worth of electricity. They also have a back-up generator to use as a last resort.

"We've never run out," Maginel said. "If it's sunny outside all day, the batteries are always 100 percent full. When we wake up in the morning, it's usually down to about 94 percent because the refrigerator or freezer runs all night."

received refunds for half the cost from state and federal tax credits.

"It would have cost us $10,000 just to have Ameren run electricity lines back here," he said. "Then you have to the pay the monthly bills. Economically for us, it was a good deal. It may be a long time before it's the same for people who live in places where electricity is already hooked up."

The Maginels also feel using the sun to create energy is their way of protecting the environment.

"We believe it's something people need to consider rather than using coal and other sources of energy," Mary Maginel said.

Jim Maginel figures his solar power home saves 5,600 pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the environment each year.

"We did quite a bit of research before we did all this," he said. "We have been thinking about it ever since we got married in 1979. We feel it's the right thing to do, and this just turned out to be the right place to do it."

Jim Maginel and his wife, Mary, enjoyed the view from their active solar-powered home, which took 10 years to build, in Olive Branch, Ill. (Diane L. Wilson) [Click to enlarge]

The Maginels constructed their home with the help of their two children, Katie and Calvin, who are in college. The family tried to use as many recycled materials as possible during the construction -- the stair steps are from an old school house that was torn down and wooden beams came from an old church.

"The house really seems to fit us real well at this point in our lives," Jim Maginel said. "I can really see a lot more people using solar power in the future. Of course it will be much more sophisticated than what we have here, but eventually this is what it will be."

For more information about solar-powered homes, contact Jim Maginel at jmaginel@semo.edu.

@contact note:

jfreeze@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 246