If you like exploring the great outdoors but prefer the comfort and security of a mobile home to sleeping in tents or relying on motels, you’ll be used to the problems associated with powering your mobile home devices.

Many will run off car batteries, but you don’t want to risk running your battery down if you’re in the middle of nowhere. Portable generators are noisy, inefficient, and tend to smell.

That’s not what you want when the aim of your trip is to relax, at ease with nature. Fortunately, the growing range of solar options for travellers can offer you a very different experience.

It’s a rule well known amongst charity workers - poorer people give the most. In any society, those who are best acquainted with struggle display the most concern for other people.

The same goes for concern for the planet. But if you’re on a budget, it’s hard to take action to protect the planet directly, especially if you live in a rented apartment.

In these circumstances you can hardly put solar panels all over the roof, and your landlord may be unwilling to cooperate with your environmentally friendly suggestions. You’ll be pleased to discover, then, that there are still some practical things you can do to live a greener lifestyle.

After a steady rise since 2003, government statistics now show that the cost of solar energy is once again falling. This means that it should be cheaper for you to request only energy from renewable sources from your electricity supplier - but it also means something else, something which might prompt you to turn you back on traditional suppliers altogether.

Why is solar energy getting cheaper? It’s for the same reason that most innovative products become cheaper over time - mass demand. As governments and big corporations start to invest in major solar powered projects, they make it possible for solar powered device manufacturers to start producing their wares on a larger scale, cutting their overheads.

Vacations in the sun are often the highlights of our lives, times we want to preserve in memory. Vacation snapshots can help us to do this - but today’s digital cameras present a problem.

If you’re traveling away from civilization, when will you get the chance to recharge your camera batteries? Where can you buy more? What will you do when your supply runs out?

The solar camera bag is the latest thing in solar accessories and inventions, and it poses an ingenious solution to this problem. It’s well built and sturdy enough to keep your camera equipment safe, and it has solar panels to draw in energy.

What really drives the market in inventions? As every successful inventor knows, it’s not just about how good a product is, it’s about how fashionable it becomes.

Now the fashion industry itself might have met its match thanks to the latest in solar accessories and inventions - solar clothes.

Solar clothes have been talked about in fashion circles for a long time, but it’s only thanks to recent technological developments that they have become a reality. This year has seen the first successfully constructed garments hit the catwalk.

Working in the city can be unpleasant at the best of times, but never more so than when summer smog saturates the air, forcing you to breathe in poisonous fumes whenever you go outside.

On days like that, it’s a great relief to be able to travel home to a nice suburban house, watching the air get cleaner as you go. But when you get in and turn on your television, turn up the air conditioning, cook a meal or heat some water for a nice relaxing bath, you’re contributing to the very problem you hate so much. You’re adding to the world’s pollution. And you don’t have to.

Solar energy consumption is on the increase. That’s the information coming from governments and international watchdogs, and it’s also a trend you can follow in the stock market.

What’s more, not only is there a greater demand for solar power, but the range of solar products available to the marketplace is diversifying rapidly. Any experienced business person will tell you that this marks the start of a boom in the industry, and that a period of rapid growth can be expected to follow. With that in mind, can you afford to wait before you get involved?

So you want to switch to solar power? It’s a great idea - but for most people, it remains just an idea, as the practicalities of installing solar power devices to support your domestic needs are daunting. Or so they used to seem.

Thanks to the massive improvements in solar technology over the past few years, using solar energy as alternative power is something worth looking at afresh.

Although early solar panels often struggled to generate significant amounts of power, especially on cloudy days, current ones are much more efficient - in many cases just one or two can be sufficient to heat all the water for a household.