Our last two electric bills have been exciting, since we've made more solar juice than we consumed, displacing evil coal electrons that some of our neighbors are still using (I won't name any names, but you know who you are!). Since we tied to the grid in January, these are the first two months we've put out more than we've used, so hopefully we'll come out in positive territory come year-end.  If not, that will give Bekah a good excuse to buy some more solar panels!

Oh how the blog can suffer  when Stephen and I are traveling!  So our book just won an award, (the first of many, right?!):  Gold from the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards in the Home & Garden category.  ForeWord is the only review

• Add new comment
• Read more

Thanks to everyone who came out to the open house! It was a great day. I wish Stephen and I had gotten a chance to speak with everyone individually, but we really appreciate your coming out in the rain, and also Bountiful Backyards for the garden tours, and Kevin Svara for the kitchen renovation tours.  And thanks to Elizabeth Shestak for the lovely article

SUNDAY MAY 17TH, 2009 OPEN HOUSE!

Here's an article our friend Sami Grover did on his favorite edibles for the yard. Great photos! Check it out.

WInd Turbine Blade (with tiny Rebekah)!!!!!

Check out this lovely book review on Treehugger: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/the-carbon-free-home.php  Earthday, whew.  Lots going on this month, fairs and festivals and lectures. We've been busy...

I'm an energy extremist, I admit it, so now that we are grid-tied I find myself daydreaming about ways to maximize the PV power we sell to the grid. So I found it annoying to turn the backup electric breaker for our solar hot water tank on and off depending on the weather.  On sunny stretches, I could leave it off and the solar thermal panels would be sufficient to heat our four person household's hot water supply. But when we got more than two cloudy days in a row, the water temp just wasn't cutting it, sinking below 80 degrees sometimes, making for a really unpleasant shower.

It's been gratifying to see the drop in water use once we got our rainbarrels, greywater, and composting toilet up and running in the fall of '07. Since then we haven't had to use any additional water for landscaping purposes. For our four-person household, we've been using about 12-15 gallons per person per day of water, well below our climate and site's potential availability.

Check out the article here.  And Rebekah just wants to point out the article published one week LATER by Thomas Friedman that seems, hhmm, perhaps a bit "derivative"!?

Thanks to YIKES, the Forest Foundation, and NC School of Science of Math - what a cool video!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl5stDoprhw

It took a while, but Rebekah finally got our PV system tied to the grid from being a stand-alone off-grid battery system. She had to get it inspected not only by the city electrical inspector but also by the recalcitrant Duke Power, not known anywhere for their progressive views (although the CEO does do a lot of greenwashing).