If you want to reduce your contribution to greenhouse gases, most people will be able to find many hundreds of kilowatt hours that can be saved easily and cheaply with minimal lifestyle change. To me, this argues for doing an especially aggressive job of trimming your electricity use. Instead we are on course to build more of them - many more. If we’re concerned about climate change, we should be shutting down coal plants. Coal is a high carbon fuel, and compared to other energy sources, coal-fired plants produce a lot of carbon dioxide relative to the amount of energy they produce.
Unfortunately, in the United States, most of our electricity comes from inefficient coal plants. Cutting down on electricity use is very effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There’s another reason to do these projects.
Another bonus is that some of our energy improvements qualified for rebates or tax credits that further increased the money we saved. We are do-it-yourselfers - this can make a huge difference in the costs involved in some projects. These tend to bring up the average return of the overall effort. Some projects cost almost nothing, but have big savings - you can see on the chart above that several paid for themselves many times over within the first year. We evaluated each project for what it would cost and what it would save, and threw out the ones that wouldn’t pay well. We did quite a bit of homework before we got started. Why was the total payback on our projects so good? The keys to our success were: On the other end of the spectrum, the solar photovoltaic project we intend to do in the future will cost as much as all 22 of our other projects put together, yet will only account for 2.5 percent of the total energy reduction! In our case, it was the simple things - such as controlling the amount of power that our computers use or basic insulating projects - that had especially good paybacks. When you start looking at any group of energy saving projects, you’ll likely find a huge difference in the bang for the buck. These eight easy home improvement projects cost us about $400 and will save us at least $9,000 over the next 10 years! Prioritizing the Projects But those I’ll explain in the following pages are the fast, simple ones. This is saving us $4,500 per year in energy costs, and has reduced our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 17 tons! Our rate of return on the money we invested in this program is more than 50 percent - tax free.Īltogether, we took on 22 different projects, including two solar heating efforts that have already appeared in MOTHER EARTH NEWS. (See Build a Simple Solar Heater, December 2006/January 2007, and Solar Heating Plan for Any Home, December 2007/January 2008.) You can find details about all the projects we’ve done at our home in Montana on my website, Build It Solar. We just went live, looking forward to watching the solar power generation! ” Michael W.Here are the details: We cut our total energy use from 93,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year to 38,000 kWh per year. “David answered my multitude of questions from beginning to end, solar installers were very friendly and professional. I will use them again when I do my addition. They were prompt to answer my questions and to trouble shoot my project. Easy power project professional#
“Simple Power was professional and personable. Mark and Dave were great to work with, as was their installation crew. “Simple Power did a great job with our solar installation and have been readily available to answer any questions or check out any issues. With efficient expert service and the patience to answer all the questions from a new solar owner, my experience couldn't have been better! Thanks Simple Power! ” Laurie B. “A new off the grid cabin for me, but the solar panels went to some thieves during escrow. We also felt the other materials that use were top-quality. “We really appreciated they were willing to use the Solar Pod no-roof-penetrating mounting system on our roof. Conscientious about schedule communication, construction steps, etc. All concealed (in attic or walls) piping.
He was very helpful during the application process, and handled a lot of the paperwork. As soon as rebates were available, Mark contacted me. Without rebates from Liberty Electric it did not make financial sense. “I worked with Mark Dickson on solar for the house since 2013.
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