[Chat] Living a little greener

[Emil Volcheck]

Hello, neighbors,

Kathleen and I did two things recently that are helping
us to heat our house more efficiently.  First, we had BGE Home
install a programmable digital thermostat.  We programmed
this to turn the heat down during the middle of the day and
much of the night.  Another advantage is that it's much easier
to read the display (large LCD digits with green illumination),
so we're less likely to push the temperature up as high
as we sometimes did when we felt cold and pushed the
pointer/lever on the old analog thermostat too high.
Second, we had security doors installed that insulate
like storm doors.  We had been thinking about getting storm
doors, but the price discouraged us.  Since our house is old,
the doors would have to be custom fit, and we were looking
at $700-$800 each for our back door and the door to our second
floor deck.  In June, a burglar stole a lot from us, and that pushed
us to act.  Officer O'Donnell recommended the company WEACO.
They installed security doors that cost about $1000 each.
This is not a lot more than plain storm doors, and they feel
like they are insulating about as well as I would have expected
storm doors to do.  WEACO also installed bars on our rear
second and third story windows.  They are tasteful, painted
white, with ornamentation.  It looks as good as I could have hoped,
given that they are bars on our windows.

We went to the Green Festival in DC last weekend and heard
a talk by Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director of Co-op America,
soon to be renamed "Green America".  She said that their
organization has been working closely with the Obama Transition
Team on a "massive deployment" of solar power.  This could
include new federal tax credits for residential solar power
installation.  There were two companies at the fair who install
solar arrays at residences: Chesapeake Solar and
Aurora Energy.  Chesapeake Solar has done a few installations
on rowhouses in Baltimore, and they described what they do.
Rowhouses are separated by brick walls that rise a foot or
two above the roofs.  They place an I-beam to support most
of the weight of the solar array on the brick walls, with supports
on the roof in-between.  They can do a 4 kilowatt photovoltaic (PV)
array, which generates just electricity (not to heat water).  They
need only cut a small hole in the roof to run down a power
cable.  In Maryland, you can buy from BGE a "smart meter"
which is reversible.  That means if you feed back power into
the grid, the meter counts down, effectively paying you for the
power you contribute at the same retail rate at which you buy
power.  This means you can sell power back to BGE during
the day when you're not using it.  The State of Maryland will
pay about a quarter of the cost, so about $10,000 on a $40,000
array.  We're hopeful that there will be a new federal tax
credit to make this even easier to buy.  By way of comparison,
the State of Massachusetts pays 2/3-rds the cost of a home
solar array.

Washington Gas and Electric had a table at the Green Festival
too.  You can switch to them from BGE and get 100 percent
of your household power generated from wind, at an additional
cost of about 2 to 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

I find all this quite exciting!  Kathleen and I are seriously considering
taking advantage of low interest rates to buy a solar array
for our house.

--Emil