Well it looks like I stirred things up a bit here. Thank you BeGreen for the kind words. And yes I do have a life elsewhere. I like hearth.com it has a good format with lots of posters and a nice variety of opinions and posters.
I suppose I should not have stayed away so long after dropping that little tweaker. Sorry Littlesmokey for not being more forth coming with information. I have had to re-learn many times that not every one shares the same intensity of interest that I have for some things. One of the things I’ve learned is that many folks are not conservationists; I would not call my self one. While solar electric is a passion for some it’s a yawn for most others.
So out of self-defense I do not post a detailed message, when I have, I get little to no response, which annoys me. So I drop in a teaser, that way if there is interest some one will step up if not I’ve not wasted half an hour.
Now to answer some questions, I’ll not repeat all the technical details those are in the other thread. Well I live in California, no wife, no kids; I have been in this house 24 years, and have a good job.
This house compared to one of your houses in the North East is like a cracker box, but hey its CA and it was built in the 1950’s. So far, I have rewired it, replaced all the windows with thermo-panes, I have some very large windows that are now low-e glass, the house has been insulated, as much roof treatment as possible has been done without replacing it, epa fireplace insert. When I moved in, in the middle of summer you could put your hand on the ceiling and feel the heat pour in. The temp would get up 110F inside when it was 80F outside; the house now averages 10-15 up to 20 degrees BELOW the outside summer temp. Last July I saw 100+ outside and 80 inside, did not last long. In the winter the furnace would run for hours to bring up the temp. Put wood in the fireplace and the furnace would come on, yea you know the routine.
So I made some changes. A few years ago when CA were have the power outages I became very annoyed when I came home from a business trip and found my freezer had melted down AGAIN this was about 2000, round about that time I heard about Solar Panels (Photo Voltaic), grid tie, and battery systems. My greatest source of info was
www.homepower.com. So I made some more changes.
A bit later a friend decided I needed to see some electric cars. His car club was going down to Watsonville, CA to see the Corbin Sparrow. I liked the idea but the Sparrow was not the car for me. A few months later I saw one of the few advertisements for the Toyota Rav4EV. I decided I could live with it and it could replace my Ford Ranger truck, which was becoming a PITA. So I made some more changes.
I gave up my traveling job a few years ago and have been fixing my house up and came to the conclusion that the old insert has to go, so I replaced it with a Avalon Perfect-Fit. It was round about that time I found hearth.com. I drop in about once a month to see what’s happening. Along with the wood stove I bought a new electric chain saw and wood splitter, so I could grab some of the freebies.
Enough of the biography:
My energy usage on the house about 16kwh per day. I normally read the power meter mornings and at night, I have done this for about 5 years now. The car uses about 360 watts per mile, I drive about 10,000 miles a year or about 3,600kwh per year. My cost for my power varies depends how you want to calculate it. My truck got 17 mpg the same 10k miles = 588 gals, average cost of gasoline in CA was about $2.25 per gallon, for $1323. I installed 2.2kw of solar specifically to supply power for the Rav4EV, my cost for the panels after rebates $4,700, so / 1323 = 3.6 years the panels paid for themselves JUST by the avoided cost of gasoline. Calculated this way I’m now driving free. OR approx. $0.02per KWH amortized cost of the solar system over 30 years.
Rebates and things;
Yes CA had some nice rebates for the solar and the car and I’m happy to take them, SO you think the petroleum companies do not get rebates. To check on incentives for your state go here;
http://www.dsireusa.org/.
As I always recommended you need to do your own research. The Internet for me has been a life savor. I now get 90% of my information from it, caveat as you know just because it’s on the internet does not mean its true, know your sources.
OK, now my cost’s for installing all of this stuff was high. I can also tell you that it works wonderfully well. What a way to stick it to Big Oil, OPEC, and Power utility all at the same time. I cannot tell you how good that feels.
PIC soap box;
Littlesmokey, sorry I’m going to pick on you a little bit now. You seem to have gotten a bit worked up over all of this. So how about directing some of that energy at you federal and state legislators. There should be a nation E-net metering law, there should be more funds directed to renewable research, there should rebate programs to get new technology off of the ground. Example: Google has just commissioned a 1.6mw solar system at the Mountain View GooglePlex
http://www.google.org/recharge/. So Google has been working on this project for a year or so, I have had my solar panels in long before Google thought of it. Google is now interested in plug-in hybrids, I had my car long before Google was interested, (Google now has two Rav4EV’s they purchased used). All of this became possible because there were enough rebates from CA to get people like me interested to buy and helped create a market. Felix Cramer (calcars.org) spoke at our EAASV.org meeting when he first came up with the idea of a plug-in hybrid conversion. Dr. Andy Frank at UC Davis did the pioneering work. Felix seen the work and worked with the Yahoo Prius user group and came up with idea when it was noticed the European versions had an “ev” switch. Again before Google was interested there has been a lot of work to get Google to step up. And the GooglePlex is 3-miles from my house.
So who is willing to put their money on the line? Who is willing to write their state representatives and congressmen to vote for renewables? I can tell you from my own experience even what I paid is about 2x to expensive. But I put my money into the hardware and life style changes it took.
I still do not consider myself as a conservationist, just the way I live.
PIC soap box closed.
Continued ..
