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Just for fun, Our New Green Home submitted itself to the GE Ecomagination challenge: http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ideas

ONGH Web site is live

Finished with the initial bits of the Our New Green Home website: http://OurNewGreenHome.com
Whew! If it weren't for urgent deadlines for other, more stressful projects I'm trying to avoid, I'd never get anything like this done!

George Dixon's Thoughts on Green

I received these thoughts from George Dixon, who started a personal path to his own dream green house years ago. Very interesting and practical considerations. Here are his unedited notes:

Perhaps I can give you a few pointers that will shorten the learning curve on your solar house ambitions. I see a lot of advertisements that paint a much rosier picture than exists in reality. I refer primarily to those who "make all the electricity they want and sell the rest back to the power company". It probably isn't true unless they live near a waterfall !!

Just a few thoughts:

• Slab foundations hold heat and cold longer that crawl space homes. The earth temperature moderates need for heating or cooling.
• Eave angles are important, but depend on compass angle where the houses are built as well as latitude. Think about the solar angle at different times of the year. In winter solar rays come in low. In summer they comes in high. If you want winter heat, be sure the sun comes in during the winter but is blocked during the summer.
• Then there is Low E glass that uses polarization, I think to block high angle rays but passes low angles.
• Hot water is easily made with panels. It is economical and reliable as long as you have large insulated storage and a backup from the grid during long cloudy periods.
• Making electricity is another story and my experience is contrary to what I see advertised. Just run the numbers on any proposals and you will see for yourself. A typical solar panel may provide 30 watts of power for peak periods during the day as long as no seagulls "spot" it. Small shadows make large reductions in power on photovoltaic cells. They are useless when even small shadows happen. So, be prepared to check them and perhaps wash them daily. Look at some numbers. A very small AC unit may pull 30 amps at 240 volts. That is 30 X 240= 7200 watts or 7.2 kw. If it runs 12 hours a day, that makes 12 X 7.2 =86.4 kw per day. So, in order to feed this one quite small AC unit you would need 86,400 watts per day. I figure that to be 2880 solar panels working 12 hours per day, which they won't. These panels cost on the order of $200 each for a total of $576,000 just to run one item. That same electricity can be bought from the power company for 86 cents per day at 10 cents per kwh. That is about $26 per month, $312 per year or less than $10,000 in 30 years. It could be a nice project or challenge, but don't expect there to be a return on investment!! Adjust the numbers to fit your own findings. I can see you like challenges, so this may be right up your alley.
• If you can do without AC, then the project looks quite different because it is easy to collect a lot of heat. One way used to cool houses in colonial times was an underground "air filled" pipe run over several acres with a wind vane to push air into the house. AC will be your largest energy "hog". Find a way to do without it and the project becomes realistic.
• You can indeed put excess electricity back into the grid and get a rebate using an inverter of sorts that converts your DC to Power Company AC and synchronizes the wave forms. It isn't terribly expensive. The problem is having excess power to sell to them. Waterfalls work around the clock in any weather.
• Then there is power storage. Electricity can be stored in batteries or put back into the grid. Batteries will need inverters to use the power on normal 115 volt appliances. There is a power loss in the conversion and this has to be considered. Then there is battery cost and battery life to be considered. They will have to be replaced every few years and will need regular testing and maintenance. They will degrade during their useful life and will not provide peak efficiency except when new.
• Wind may be helpful where you live, but it is noisy and your neighbors will not appreciate it. I have very little experience with it other than some brief usage on a sail boat. It takes a LOT of wind for the project to be efficient. I am referring to consistent 20 mph winds.
• I started to build a full solar home, but the cost vs rewards ratio was just not there for me. I know some people in Arizona who can maintain their lifestyle with a low need for electricity have made it work. My wife and I want the conveniences and I just couldn't make it work. Perhaps you can !!!

Day 1 - We closed on the sale of the lot!

Day 1 on the lot of our future new green home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BNSyuP2djg