Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Published on October 16, 2011 By Draginol In Home Improvement

My house uses a lot of energy. Specifically, it uses a lot of electricity.

A good portion of that electricity is because of the Geothermal system which uses Geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool the house.

To offset that, I had a 20KW solar array installed.  While October is not the most ideal of months for solar power (lot of rainy days), the results are looking somewhat promising.

Now, let me first be clear: Even with all the subsidies involved (which are a lot) the cost per KW was still $4.  The magic number is $1.  Without the subsidies, it would have been around $10 per KW.  In other words, it’s very unlikely I’ll ever make back what I paid to put into it to get it set up.  But that wasn’t really the point.  Not for me anyway.

So here are the results for the first month: The house ended up using about 7KWh per day of net power (instead of 85KWh).

This translates into a residential electrical bill of around $45 instead of $355. 


Comments
on Oct 18, 2011

Do you know that your RSS is pushing this article several times per hour?

on Oct 21, 2011

SERIOUSLY WTF

It's hammering the hell out of my RSS feed. What's going on man!?

on Oct 23, 2011

Interesting figures.

If I've interpreted your numbers correctly, it looks like you are paying around $0.20/KWh. That seems high. Are your electricity rates flat, or is there any form of time-of-day rates? Thanks.

on Oct 24, 2011

Did you mean it costs $4 per watt (not kW)?

on Oct 26, 2011

I'm tempted to post a comment every time this article gets pushed to my RSS. 

 

That should be in the neighborhood of 50 comments. per day.

on Oct 26, 2011

post

on Oct 26, 2011

post

on Nov 01, 2011

Brad, I love your blog, but this post is bugged somehow. Your blog has generated 261 articles in the past 30 days, 9 per day, and almost all of them have been this post. It's getting so that I'm considering unsubscribing just to get the avalanche of this post to stop.

Could you just delete this post, please? That might fix it. Or deactivate the post, or something? Pretty please?

on Nov 02, 2011

post x 56

on Nov 03, 2011

post x 22

on Nov 04, 2011

post x 20

on Nov 07, 2011

post x 77

You really don't read your comments, do you frogboy.

on Nov 08, 2011

post x 20

 

on Nov 18, 2011

post x 300