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're actually probably doing well overall in terms of cost. Since we honestly don't know how our house compares to non-"green" homes this size, we really don't know how much our bills should be. We also have some potential power hogs (i.e. a hot tub and a steam unit). We do know that our heating system--typically the biggest consumer of power in a home--uses very little power at all.  So that helps a great deal.  Technically, if we had a standard HVAC system our bills could be nearly double!

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!