Gay Walker

...but was wary of the cost. We built our house 26 years ago on some acreage and started with two furnaces fueled by propane gas, which also heated the indoor pool, the stovetop, two water heaters, two gas fireplaces, and ran the air conditioning system. This is a big house, which has only two thermostats, one for each floor. About ten years ago, the cost of propane gas doubled, which was a shock. Instead of paying well over $1,500 a month during the winter, we instead cut back on our usage, no longer heating the pool and wearing layers so we could keep the temperature between 56-60 degrees Fahrenheit, not a comfortable existence, but one we were willing to suffer.

I have a daughter who lives with me and teaches online for Stanford; she is a big part of my sensitivity to “saving the planet” and doing the right thing. I retired three years ago and found myself at a place where I thought I could afford to put my money where my mouth was, so in 2019 I bought a Tesla. This was an eye-opener and brought electricity to the fore of my thinking. This year finally decided to add solar panels to generate electricity, and it seemed far more efficient to add enough of them to reach net zero and remove the propane tank altogether, which we have now done. We have 64 panels (20.5 kW) on the roof and two inverters in the garage. The real bonus was that the price penciled out to be recouped in less than ten years, which I hadn’t expected. There were incentives from both the state and the federal government. In five years, I expect to be looking at adding some battery backups to enable us to actually use the sunlight’s energy directly if the grid goes down.

I started the project in mid-February by bringing in an energy consultant. After considering his recommendations, I asked the firm I finally went with to come in for consultation and an estimate in mid-March and signed the agreement in April, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to start right away due to Covid-19 preparations and other projects. I had to take down a couple of trees that were way too close to the house or were damaged, which was done in mid-June, and the project was actually underway on July 14^th with the panels installed by July 24^th. The heating/cooling system changeover began after that and was essentially completed by mid-August. PGE inspected the solar set-up, and the panels were turned on August 6^th.

I thought our project was going to be particularly complicated, as we were changing over our entire heating/cooling system to electricity at the same time as switching to solar, but it turned out to be a smooth transition. Our contractor was experienced at both and had two project managers directing different crews who could work in sequence rather than in tandem, which was easier all around. We stayed in the house and felt very little upheaval, even under the pandemic precautions. All went smoothly with the electrician being the unifying bridge between the teams.

I can check the wonderful app on my cell phone from anywhere to see how much energy is being—and has been—generated by the sun shining on those solar panels. In the first month from August 6^th through September 6^th, I am happy to report that we had saved over two and a half tons of carbon dioxide emissions from being spewed into the air, or virtually planted the equivalent of 42 trees. I am delighted with the ease of the change-over and my excellent interactions with the contractor and the workmen. I’m only sorry I hadn’t started the whole project two or three months earlier to have taken greater advantage of our hot summer!

...and move to a fully electric house. We knew we could do this with a few minor tweaks to the heating system, cooking, fireplace, etc. What we would soon find out is that when we combined those upgrades with a few relatively minor Home Performance upgrades, we would be able to get the house to net zero energy!

It really started with reducing the home’s energy consumption. Upgrading the heating system from a 95% efficient gas furnace to a 350% efficient heat pump was responsible for much of the reduction. The air sealing, duct sealing, and insulation upgrades and the water heater upgrade took care of the rest.

Because the utilities will only incentivize us to produce as much electricity as we consume, we had to switch the home’s primary energy source from propane to electricity to even have a chance at a true net zero energy design. Fortunately Gay was committed to getting off fossil fuels and willing to make the investment necessary to do so. And as luck would have it, Gay had a large enough southwest facing roof that we were just able to get a large enough system up there to get her home to net zero. Although we could have installed a large ground mount solar array and still gotten the house to net zero, keeping the array on the roof helped us keep costs down.

After factoring in the incentives, we modeled that this entire project will have roughly a 10-year payback. The solar array will last well beyond the 25-year warranty and much of the Home Performance work is effectively permanent. So it’s safe to say that this project will end up paying for itself several times over. And there are several benefits, both obvious (reducing carbon footprint) and less obvious (increasing the home’s comfort and air quality) that help make a project like this worthwhile. We can’t get every house to net zero, but we can get many homes very close. And even though these types of projects don’t always have a 10-year payback, they will generally pay for themselves in the long run. If this is the type of project you’re interested in, it’s definitely worth exploring what we can do to minimize your home’s consumption and whether a solar array can offset that consumption.