A guest post by Shel Horowitz
Living in cloudy New England, in a 1743 farmhouse, we’ve put in both solar hot water and photovoltaic on the roof. We also use windows, drapes/curtains, and fans to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and as a result, our energy use is quite a bit less than the typical home of our size in our region.
It does help that we’re blessed with an east-facing roof over a big empty cornfield, and we get lots of sun. When we bought the house ten years ago, it already had four skylights on that side of the roof.
The solar hot water showed immediate results: our former electric water heater was a big power-eater, and our bill dropped about $100 the first month. And we didn’t even know the electric backup system wasn’t working until we had three cloudy days in a row (which happened while the system was still under warranty, fortunately). And we warn every houseguest not to turn the shower on full heat, because the water is HOT! We put in the system seven or eight years ago, and I think it’s probably already paid for itself–especially since the price of electricity has gone up significantly since we made the change.
Two years later, we put the photovoltaic system in, which converts sunlight directly to electricity. Results are mixed. I think it was installed too low on our steep-sloped roof, and as a result, even in the summer, by about 4 p.m. the mountain behind the cornfield starts to shade our collectors. I think if we had put them higher, we might be getting 25% more electricity. For the first few years, our electricity bills were showing typically that we were selling back to the power company about 10% of what we were consuming from the power grid, and sometimes as low as 3%. And of course, there is a presumably much larger number number (we haven’t tracked it) of kilowatts that we actually use directly from our solar system. But all of a sudden, it’s improved. Our best month, just this summer, we brought our electric bill down to just a few dollars.
I’ll be honest–we’d hoped for more of a reduction in our bill from this system. It cost us five thousand dollars and will be a long time before we make back the investment. But we’re going to be in this house for a few decades yet, and the price of electricity will keep going up. Plus, we can run our computers and light fixtures and everything else with a cleaner, greener conscience.
Shel Horowitz‘s award-winning sixth book, “Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First”, demonstrates how to use Green and ethical principles to succeed in business. He is the founder of the international Business Ethics Pledge campaign, http://www.business-ethics-pledge.org
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