Going Solar
In December of 2004, we were finally able to make our home a solar home. In preparation for putting up our solar PV and solar hot water panels, we made our home more energy friendly. Some of the things we did are as follows:
- Replaced worn out appliances with energy efficient ones
- Replaced burned out incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones
- Added insulation to the attic
- Installed a clothes line to let the sun and wind dry our clothes
- Got a solar oven to reduce energy use
- Installed double pane windows
- Put in California native plants to shade the house in the summer
The solar hot water does a great job but does need direct sunlight. A couple of hours will do it. We use it to feed our tankless water heater, which we use as a backup. The tankless water heater will not even turn on if the water is hot enough coming in from the solar hot water panel which it is quite often. We have cut our natural gas use in half just with this set up.
The sun oven works great, even on cold days so long as there is sun. It can cook 3 potatoes and 2 yams together on a sunny day in about 2 hours. We have also cooked brownies, veggie stew, veggie chili, bread, and more in it. It doesn't heat up the house and the cooking smells stay outside as well as saving energy.
If you have any questions on how to go solar, reduce greenhouse gas emission, conserve energy, and save money in the long term, please ask.
posted by Bob Groff @ 10:15 AM
4 Comments:
Just as a follow up, our July PG&E bill was $11.91, including a constant $4.88 monthly charge for the meter, which seems to be a $0.44 increase from last month when our bill was a whopping $12.58. This is the combined electric and gas bill. The only reason the bill is this high is I forgot to turn off the pilot light on the water heater, which has not been needed because of our passive solar water heater supplying all the hot water we need.
And the solar oven is working great as well.
Well, here it is at the end of another year. We are finishing up around 200 kWh ahead of the game. That is about 2 months of electricity use for us. What is really great about it is we provided clean energy back into the grid for our neighbors to use rather than have it generated at a distant power plant. Another exciting part is we are about to break even on the energy costs it took to make, transport, and install our panels. Now THAT is a great feeling!
Following up on solar, it has been 7 years since we installed our solar panels (PV and hot water). Things are still going well and our utility bills are in the low double digits. Our total electric production over the past 7 years has been 16.577 Megawatt Hours. We are still very happy with our system.
It is late November, 2011, and we are still using our solar oven! It has been a bit spotty lately because of the somewhat cloudy days but it still works great. We have used the electric oven in the house fewer than 10 times over the past several years. If you would like to see one in action, I will bring our to the summer picnic in 2012 and cook up something for the party.
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