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Community Corner

Considering Solar Panels: A Lesson In Conservation

With Small Steps And Big Ones, Energy Use Can Be Greatly Reduced

A few years ago I decided my family ought to use fewer fossil fuels but we didn’t know what to do. We were, and largely remain, average East Coast dwellers burning up fossil fuel in our cars and house and applauding, from afar, off-grid handymen and people rich enough to buy two banks of solar panels.

We live in a 1,100-square-foot Victorian house in a tiny Connecticut town. My family considers itself frugal and environmentally conscious. We keep the thermostat low, use compact fluorescents (and don’t throw them in the regular trash), aren’t big appliance users, don’t have an air conditioner. We have one home computer and no microwave. We cook on a propane stove and use a water-saving shower nozzle.

When utility deregulation and supply shortages hit the Northeast a few years ago, I started to pay attention to our electric bills. The bill for the period from mid-January to mid-February 2005, came to $216.37 for 1,694 kilowatt-hours of power. (Including all of the transmission and distribution surcharges in my state, the rate at that time was almost 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now it’s more like 19.)

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In southern New England, nuclear and natural gas, augmented by oil and coal (there’s a coal plant in New London) still provide much of the electricity. My family’s high electric bill forced me to look at our way of life, consider our electricity and where it comes from. I quickly learned that we were paying not only much more than we had budgeted, but that we were using almost twice as much electricity as the average household in our state, even though we have a small house and don’t heat with electricity. (We heat with an oil-burning furnace.) It puzzled us, but it appeared that our electric hot water heater was the main culprit.

The same month, I talked to Ed Witkin, who at the time lived west of me in Bridgewater, Conn., with his wife, Ellen Shrader, and their two daughters. Their modern house ran almost entirely on solar energy. They were not connected to the electric grid; no wires extended up their long driveway from the street. Forced by their own choice to be careful with power, they had settled into a routine of using no more than 150 kilowatt-hours a month.

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The Witkin-Shrader family was the same size as ours—two adults and two teenage daughters—and the house itself was larger than ours. They were using one-tenth of what we were in the winter (which is our highest use time because we don’t have air-conditioning). They weren’t sitting in the dark, washing in frigid water, or cooking on an open fire. Like my family they owned one computer and did without a microwave. Their daughters took long, hot showers just as ours did, they had a propane kitchen stove similar to ours, and they, too, watched little television.

Here is where they differed from us: Their refrigerator (a Sun Frost) was an ultra-low-energy brand, while ours was not; they heated water with solar collectors on their roof, while we heated our water with electricity; they used compact fluorescent bulbs in all of their fixtures, while we had only two in our house. My family was using more than ten times the energy they were.

This realization that I wasn’t the au naturel, environmentally conscious woman I’d envisioned made me feel like a guest on Candid Camera, in which I’d first told some stranger on the street that I probably used less electricity than everyone I knew, only to find that I was a bad statistic.           

What was up? We, like most Americans, were hooked on a way of life that used too much energy. We might not be wasteful people by nature, but we were going about our business without the feeling that we should turn things off. We didn’t consider it an emergency to replace our 10-year-old refrigerator. We thought that someday we’d get around to replacing the bulbs. We sometimes forgot to turn off lights and appliances.

The Witkin-Shraders paid attention to everything, because they were collecting their own energy at their house and didn’t want to run out. We, on the other hand, knew that more energy would always be there for us, as long as we were willing to pay for it.

My husband and I had to face up to the fact that we were not doing enough by living in a small house and holding onto old appliances like our vintage 1993 refrigerator, which used four times the energy of many available new models. Our top-loading washing machine was even older, but because it still operated, we didn’t want to discard it even though it used far more power and water than the new front-loading tumble washers. We relied on what we thought was an efficient electric water heater, bought only a few years ago. But then we started to believe that heating water with electricity is wasteful.

Until that year when I compared my house to the Witkin-Shraders’, I did not realize that a family like mine could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. I have since realized that our 1,100-square-foot Victorian house could drastically cut its energy consumption. At a grassroots level all of us can begin to change the world by refusing to depend solely on distant sources of fossil fuels. It makes sense morally, financially, and, most of all, environmentally.

How do we do it? Making the move to using less energy isn’t an easy choice in financial terms, for us and for most middle-class people. But I’m pleased to say that my family has made major changes in just a few years, and yours can too. One year we bought a new refrigerator, the lowest-energy Maytag I could find. The next year we replaced the washer with a tumble-style Frigidaire. Both were a little more expensive than what we were used to, but we immediately saw the savings in our electric bills. We replaced  most of the lightbulbs in the house with compact-fluorescent bulbs.

We are reducing our fossil-fuel usage step-by-step. We didn’t want to just sit back and wait for the large utilities to start using solar or wind power and thus make changes for us. (In fact our state, like many states, has added surcharges that enable it to put money into renewable sources, which means that officials are starting to help us move toward renewables, no matter how slowly that transition might be.) We took action ourselves.

So what happened to our energy use? We’ve done OK in three years. The electric bill covering the period from mid-January to mid-February 2008 was $191.65 for 1,071 kilowatt-hours. That month we owed roughly 11.5 percent less than for the same month in 2005, even though the rate (including the delivery surcharges) had increased by more than 38 percent. More important was our reduction in energy use by almost 37 percent. We have yet to replace our hot-water heater, so I know that we can improve on our record so far.

Most of our changes have been to conserve energy. But what about installing equipment to gather energy from the sun, wind, a stream, or underground? These technologies are now available to home and apartment dwellers. How quickly can consumers recoup investments in alternative energy sources? My family is starting to consider these technologies as they enter the realm of affordability.

Because electricity is now about 19 cents per kilowatt-hour in Connecticut, it appears a photovoltaic system would pay for itself in four to eight years. Efficient appliances can pay for themselves in a few years. Gas-electric hybrid cars can pay for themselves in even less time, depending on the model you choose. Yes, we would get that money back, and yes, we would begin to get away from the old ways as soon as we made these choices. In almost all cases, you would eventually recoup your investment. Environmentally, you and the rest of the planet begin to receive benefits the second you make the switch.

This is based on an excerpt from my book Energy Independence (Lyons Press).

 

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