LinuxRocks! wrote:
I talked with someone last summer, and he has successfully converted his house to solar, and it has paid well. but it took a lot of fanagleing to make it pay off... stuff like tax incentives, grants, and returning power to the grid (he gets paid for excess electricity). He still uss electricity from the grid, so he isnt completely self sustained. He worked it all out very well, and i think it took him less than 5 years to figure it all out, and get it working and paid for. I think he siad he ends up paying like $50/year to the electric company. In some places solar works realy really well... but oregon isnt the best for solar, but clearly, it can work.
Hope he did it himself. Was outraged at the recent green home show, at the fairgrounds. The solar "developers" there were all over about how Oregon is perfect for solar--gets more sun than Germany, which is the number one solar-powered nation on earth.
But when you got a load of what they charged, your jaw dropped. These dogs wanted more than thirty thousand bux to make your home electric. And they had all these gee-whiz graphs and charts to show you how the cost of investing in solar would pay for itself in--get this--"TWENTY TO THIRTY YEARS."
New technologies are always expensive--but goddam, where do these sharks get off? Originally, solar technology was NOT so over-valued--and usually it was a do-it-yourself proposition.
S'pose there's gotta be predators ready to exploit--and we Oregonians, with our hipper-than-thou smug, seem ripe for plunder.
Got plans for a solar shower that's made of black ABS pipe. Total cost less than twenty bucks. Remember the ole hippy saw, "people's prices?"
_______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
