So What Does It Really Cost/Save in Energy?

I know we have promised you, dear reader, some news about how well our home is performing on energy consumption but this turns out to be harder than it seems! We have now lived in the home for more than a year so we finally have a year's worth of power and propane bills collected. We must say that they have been higher than we had thought! But having said that, we honestly don't know how our house compares to one similar that was built by conventional standards. We also have some potential power hogs (i.e. a hot tub and a steam unit). What we must do at this point to really see where the bulk of the electrical usage originates it to install a monitor that can do a check on individual circuits. We're working on this!

We can say that our little 1.2 kW solar power system did indeed produce 1,000 kWh over the first year in service. While that is not a lot, it most likely covered the power needed to run our geothermal ground source heat pump.

More coming soon!