Green
After Jeff let me take his Ferrari 360 Spider out for a spin a while back, I was talking with Charlie. Charlie has a friend with a lot of nice cars. One of which is a Tesla.
Selling energy back to Xcel Energy is very, very cheap.
The latest update in the “Greening†effort was to replace my old X10 Thermostat (TXB-16) with a new Venstar T1800 7 day programmable thermostat, and then hook up an INSTEON adapter to it that will let a product called Indigo on my home control computer run it.
My green home upgrade continues with the addition of a product from a company name The Energy Detective called TED 5000. Basically this is a meter that let’s me keep an eye on energy usage with both the feed from Xcelenergy (the power company here) and my solar panels. It’s something only a guy could love (the geeky graphs and huge amounts of data), but on the side, also lets me know, down to the watt, what each device in the house is using.
I finally made the decision to jump into some home improvements, one of which is putting a Solar PV array (Photo-voltaic) on the roof. I’m not home enough to benefit from solar heating, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I can end up with zero electricity bills at the end of each year.