Just out of curiosity, how much electricity (and gas, wood, etc.) do people
on the list use? And what do you pay for it?
Gene, you mentioned $30 per month for electricity. What's that in
kilowatts? What else do you use?
Jeff, how many Kwh you use per month? What other fuels do you use?
Anyone else?
Here in California electricity is said to be expensive. We pay about $9
per month for 90 Kwh of electricity @ $0.048 per Kwh (+other fees). We
also pay $0.30 per therm of natural gas which is about $6 per month in the
summer and $22 per month in the winter (hydronic floor heating). While I'm
at it, we also use about 29 gallons of gasoline per month, which is $15 at
the $1.35 per gallon we have been paying lately.
That's a total of $745 per year for fuel. And way over half of that is for
a car! I guess I know what to work on next.
Back to solar systems. At $100 per year it would take a while to pay for a
system. Unless we were producing a large surplus, which is not impossible
in the summer here and we can do a buy back plan. But I don't think that
was what Jeff was getting at. If you look at a lot of the other factors
solar looks pretty good. Jeff, can you give me a rough estimate the cost
of a 0.3 Kwh per day system? I've heard about $10,000 - $12,000. I know
there are a lot of variable, but just a guess? What about a guerilla
system for a good chunk of our power?
Eric Storm
