My idea, which isn’t unique, would be to mandate that all folks living below, let’s say the Mason Dixon line (drawn all the way west), would have to have solar on their homes by, oh, 2015. Why? Not strong enough solar falling this far north, coupled with cheap hydro power. Anyway:The problem as I see it is that the payback (here in the NW) is worse than other areas. Funny how when prices rise, people get smarter about consumption? Guess we need to have the real price of gas be factored in, which includes wars for it, etc. And I think people do more of this kind of thinking now that gas costs are rising. Well I *need* my car but i don’t *need to upgrade to solar. Less climate-warming emissions, no extra costs. Which means that I could have had a nifty, high-efficiency furnace years ago, without paying a bit more for heat (utilities + financing costs) than I did with our old clunker. You see, if I had financed the furnace-i.e., bought it on credit, or taken out a homeowners loan to pay for it-the amount that we saved on utility bills each year would have just about equalled our annual payments. On reflection, though, the fact that we waited to buy a high-efficiency furnace proves one thing: I’m a dolt. Maybe it’s my upbringing (my dad was hilariously stingy) but I hated the thought of going into debt, and paying interest and financing costs, just to buy an appliance. After 10 years, we’d stop paying for the furnace, and it would start paying us.īut in practice, we never seemed to be able to save up the cash. In theory, of course, that’s still a pretty good investment. In fact, some back-of-the envelope calculations a few years back convinced me that it could take nearly a decade before the savings on our gas bills paid for the up-front costs of a new furnace. It’s big, it’s ugly, and worst of all, it’s inefficient-so we pay much more for heat than we’d like, even in Seattle’s relatively mild winters.īut new furnaces don’t come cheap. We’ve been meaning to replace our furnace-an old oil heater that was converted to gas back in the 70s-for years.
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