I recently posted on the topic of energy consumption and our sustainment systems. With a few homestead advances, I feel we’ve really started down the path to energy independence. While the real first step directly stems from deciding we wanted to pursue a goal and identifying it, I feel we’ve only recently, taken the first “real†steps and have realized actual results.
As I highlighted in the last post, my short term goal was to drop our monthly consumption below 500 kWh/month. Skipping to the punchline, our June consumption was exactly 500 kWh/month!
The ultimate goal is to reduce our power usage to the point where local electricity production, passive solar water heating, and wood heat are enough to sustain our energy needs (and give us the choice of dropping off the grid). An interim, and somewhat more practical goal, given our budget, is to net-meter our power usage/generation and to energy neutral.
Net metering allows electricity consumers to become electricity producers and sell back to the power company. Ideally, we’d accumulate enough credit from the long super-sunny summer days to offset the dark overcast winters. $0 power bills, nirvana.
My next few posts with walk through the progress we’ve made so far and I’ll occasionally post with updates. I think everything we’ve done is repeatable and I’d love to see others attack their energy waste, too!