Daily Home Renovation Tips

Editor’s Note: Over the holidays we are re-publishing selected articles related to our ecoENERGY energy conservation experiences. Some of the grant amounts may have changed. To access the more than 20 articles we have written on our energy conservation experiences through the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program, simply use this link to access our ecoENERGY Energy Conservation page.

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The last of the energy savings tips included in our Energy Efficiency Evaluation Report received on our house under the ecoENERGY Grant program related to alternate electricity source:

Photo…what? Let’s try  ’solar energy’ for us mere mortals, shall we.  :-)

Whereas the solar wall system reviewed in yesterday’s post was related to using the sun’s light & energy to generate heat for a home, this relates to using the sun’s light & energy to generate electricity.

From what we can tell, this is out of the budget for us, and possibly most residential homes. And, one of the vendor web sites we found stated ‘…buying and installing a solar energy system is not so different from any other major home renovation‘ ….yikes! We think we need to catch our breath first form our current home renovation (as well as the things we put off due to budget constraints like replacing the flooring in the main foyer and laundry room).

We found this vendor’s site which offered a good explanation of what solar energy is all about, options and so on if you are interested in more information.

As we end this look at many of the energy saving tips in our report, the one area of disappointment is that it did not include information on these last three tips. Wind power, solar wall system and photovoltaic (solar energy) are not common to most home owners.

It would have been beneficial if the report explained these in more detail, even if it was simply a paragraph or two similar to how it explained other tips and recommendations with links where the house owner could directly go for more details, rather than leave it to the house owner to do their own Internet searches.

However, we still really like the report.