Does anyone out there on my Friends List know about alternative power at home? Like having your own solar panels or mini wind turbines and whatnot?
I’m not particularly interested in wind, but I’ve always wanted a house with solar panels. Apparently you can get them at Canadian Tire now and places like Home Depot also offer installation. Huh. Who knew?
Anyway, just throwing it out there. Any input is awesome.
I’ve been looking for a site that lists the actual costs and benefits in simple terms. Such as “if you want to do X, you’ll need Products A, B, and C, which cost about $A, $B, and $C and can provide $Q savings and Z benefits. If you want to do Y, you’ll need… etc.”
Stuff about Canada would be best, but northern USA works too.
Is it worth doing to heat your water?
Is it worth doing to generate power for your house?
It it not worth it for anything until the tech improves/until something else?
I know there’s a program in Ontario where you can connect your PV panels to the Grid and the government will pay you for the power you put into the Grid, but I think that’s for larger installations than a household roof?
I started asking questions about this once. The general answers I got were:
1) Solar panels are too expensive
2) Solar panel batteries are very expensive and require expensive maintenance.
3) The amount of power you save in a year, is about 1 lightbulb for an hour.
Meanwhile I want to believe. I’m firm in my un-researched belief that if the government sponsored solar panels on every roof (instead of energy absorbing and non-environmentally friendly ashphalt shingles), we’d have plenty of energy for everyone.
Yeah, everything seems really expensive right now. I’m sure it’s much less expensive than a few years ago, but I keep getting numbers from between $4k and $20k, depending on how much you want to keep using the normal power Grid.
I think if we ever did something like retrofitting regular house roofs en masse, the price would drop like a stone (simple supply and demand and large-scale manufacturing), the tech would improve, and we’d have loads of power available.