A Wild Ride - Electrifying Even

Published in the Sun January 21,2012

Driving Without Gasoline

Now that I have driven an electric Nissan Leaf every day for a month, I will tell you an adventure story – the story of driving to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.  You are probably thinking that driving to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is not an adventure.  You assume it is unremarkable because you can just pump some gasoline into your car and head off, gasoline that you can buy anywhere.  Hah!  That’s like Olympic curling, in which seemingly ordinary people push stones across the ice.  Where’s the sport in that?  But driving an electric car to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is something else entirely, a feat that takes cunning and skill, like rushing down the ski jump and hurtling into the sky.

My daughter Kimberly grew bored with driving the Leaf around Georgetown, a task for which it is perfectly designed.  She wanted to test the limits of its range with a little road trip.  And to make the road trip even more challenging, let’s throw a toddler in the back seat.  So on a bright January morning, armed with only a credit card and some goldfish crackers, we unplug the Leaf and head toward the highway.  My battery charge meter says we can go 96 miles, but I know this is an illusion.  It means we could go 96 miles if we putter around town at 35 mph.  As soon as I accelerate onto IH 35 the meter drops to 80 miles.  It is 82 miles to the Wildflower Center and back.  The Leaf cannot use gasoline; we will make it on electricity or call a tow truck.  I switch into Eco Mode, which means we sacrifice some performance for increased range.  We can’t use the heater, which also burns up electricity.  Luckily it is a warm day.  Our plan is to go straight to Whole Foods Market, on 6^th and Lamar, where there is a free charging station.  We will eat lunch and shop while the car charges.  With a 240 volt charger we can add about 12 miles of range for an hour of charge.  As I drive down Mopac I ponder what to do if somebody else is using the charger.  Fortunately the Leaf’s GPS system knows the locations of all the downtown charging stations.  Maybe we can find a back-up station.  When we arrive at Whole Foods, much to my relief the charging station is available and one of the parking places in front of it, reserved for electric vehicles, is open.  The other reserved spot is taken by a Honda Insight hybrid.  Excuse me, the Insight is not an electric car.

After lunch the Honda Insight is gone, and in its place is another Nissan Leaf, identical to mine.  I wonder if its driver is cursing me for occupying the charger.

After a nice tour of the Wildflower Center, where there is no electricity in the parking lot, we head home.  The meter says I have 48 miles of range for the 40 mile return trip, but my mind starts to conjure up worst-case scenarios.  What if the meter is wrong?  What if I drive too fast and use up the charge?  What if the car slows down to unsafe speeds as it reaches the bottom of the battery?  I never had to think about this stuff before.  There was always a gas station every 100 yards along the highway.

Back on Mopac I am still in Eco Mode.  Every time my speed drifts above 60 mph, Kimberly yells at me to slow down.  The baby however is sleeping peacefully, completely unaffected by charge anxiety.  By Round Rock the cushion of range has shrunk to 4 miles.  Twelve miles home and only 16 miles of charge.  Then it shrinks to a three mile cushion, then two.  When I reach 9 miles of charge the nice GPS lady suggests that I need to find a charging station quickly and offers to direct me to the Georgetown Public Library.  But this is no time to be timid; I’m heading for the finish line of a petroleum-free road trip.  Slowing down as we exit the interstate allows my range to increase a bit.  The Leaf slides victorious into the garage with a full 5 miles of charge left.

Texas Bottle Bill

This is me with the bottles and cans I collected in only 30 minutes at Mankin's Crossing near Jonah, Texas.


Published in the Sun December 10, 2011

The historical marker at Mankin’s Crossing near Jonah says the low water bridge is “a popular recreational site for area residents.”  People like to fish there, but the most popular recreation at the site appears to be beer-drinking, or maybe beer-drinking while fishing.  I recently travelled to Mankin’s Crossing to satisfy my curiosity about roadside litter and how it might be affected by the Texas Bottle Bill, otherwise known as the Texas Container Recycling Initiative.  Readers of a certain maturity will remember that long before recycling was a household word, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks used to be sold in glass bottles.  You would drink your six-pack of Cokes and then take the bottles back to the grocery store to be reimbursed a few pennies a bottle for your trouble.  The Coca Cola company would collect the empties and refill the sterilized bottles with another delicious cane sugar beverage.  The bottles would be used over and over again until they were too scuffed to be appetizing.  Beer was sold this way also.

But then in the 1960s aluminum cans and plastic bottles came along.  Now the beverage companies could bottle their wares more cheaply, and not worry about all that nasty collecting and cleaning and trucking back to the factory.  The bottles were labeled “No deposit, no return” to inform the consumer that it was OK to just throw it away.  And throw them away we did.  This year alone, almost 120 billion beverage containers have been littered, landfilled, and incinerated in the United States, about twice as many as have been recycled.  Beverage containers make up about 40 to 60% of all roadside litter.

Bottle bills resurrect the practice of redeeming empty beverage containers for a deposit refund, but these days the used containers are recycled rather than refilled.  All beer, carbonated sodas, sports drinks, and bottled water are covered, whether made of aluminum, plastic, or glass.  Ten states currently have bottle bills.  The bill proposed for Texas would work like this.  Beverage distributors would charge retailers 5 cents per container, a fee the retailer would then pass on to the consumer.  At this point the distributor has an extra 5 cents per beverage, which is contributed to a special fund.  The consumer is out one nickel, but he will get that nickel back if he chooses to return the can or bottle to a neighborhood redemption center.  The redemption center will be reimbursed 5 cents, plus a one and a half cent handling fee by an independent board that is financed by all those nickels collected from the distributors.  It is only fair after all, that since the distributors are the ones making money on all the drinks they sell, they should bear some responsibility for disposing of the waste, rather than shifting the entire burden of clean-up to city and state governments.  Since not all containers will be redeemed there will be enough nickels to cover those handling fees.  The redemption center is also allowed to keep all proceeds from the sale of the recyclable materials.  These proceeds can be significant, especially in the case of aluminum cans, which can fetch 60 or 65 cents a pound.  Redemption centers could be run by independent businesses, retailers, municipalities, or even churches and schools.

Last month the US Senate, in an almost unbelievable moment of bipartisanship, unanimously passed Senate Resolution 251, which “expresses support for improvement in the collection, processing, and consumption of recyclable material throughout the United States in order to create well-paying jobs, foster innovation and investment in the United States recycling infrastrtucture, and stimulate the economy of the United States.”  But this is a resolution; it doesn’t actually do anything.  To do something actual bills are needed.  The Texas Bottle Bill will be introduced to the state legislature in 2013.

States with bottle bills have decreased their container litter by as much as 80% and have increased recycling rates above levels achieved with curbside recycling alone.  Most provinces in Canada have bottle bills, and they achieve remarkable recycling rates with deposits as high as 20 cents.  Michigan’s bottle bill created jobs for 4684 people in the redemption industry, New York added 3800 jobs.

In addition to creating jobs, reducing litter, and saving resources and energy, the adoption of a bottle bill transforms empty beverage containers from trash to treasure.  People with time on their hands will start gathering bottles that others have discarded in order to collect the deposits.  People who do this a lot are called “canners.”  And that brings me back to Mankin’s Crossing.  I wanted to see how many deposits a motivated canner could gather up in a short time.  Armed only with a large trash sack and a pair of gloves, in thirty minutes flat I collected 21 glass beer bottles, 19 plastic bottles, and 52 aluminum cans.  That would be four dollars and sixty cents in deposits, if Texas had a bottle bill.  Had I been willing to wade into the cold water I could have snagged at least ten more cans.

By the way, the fishermen at Mankin’s Crossing prefer Bud Light.

Metal Recycling

Was supposed to be published in the Sun today but wasn't, probably because Al and Hwy 195 Metal Recycling parted company, and photos were subsequently unavailable.  (Actually it turns out there was enough space in the paper.  It got published the following Wednesday.)

Al Newman rarely needs his magnet to distinguish between different metals.  Instead he relies on color, weight, and even texture to tell him what is steel and what is aluminum.  Al is a metal artist, and he looks the part, tall and lanky with a silver-gray ponytail and one long feather earring.  Some people might not appreciate a job sorting scrap at Highway 195 Metal Recycling, but to Al it is a wonderful opportunity to scavenge discarded treasures for his art.

My husband (Bill) and I have loaded up our pickup with buckets of used screws, rebar, an old aluminum screen door, a fan stand with the fan missing, and some short pieces of insulated copper wire and have taken a short drive out Highway 195.  The Metal Recyclers are located far back in an active quarry, but a series of signs with arrows point us through a maze of gravel roads and heavy equipment.  We finally arrive at a trailer perched beside a large truck scale.  Perilously close to the trailer an enormous excavator with a grapple hook is plucking old water heaters from a mountain of steel scrap onto a container truck, carefully placing them onto the top and pounding them into place.

We drive across the scale, weighing in at 5580 pounds, and then down the ramp where Al is waiting for us.  Bill backs the pickup toward the steel mountain – the opposite side from where the excavator is still working – and we throw out all of the steel, fitting as much of it as we can into an old dishwasher so the excavator will be able to pick it up.  Al says there is never any shortage of old dishwashers, and they make great boxes for steel scraps.

After we get rid of the steel, Al weighs our aluminum and copper.  The base of the fan is cast aluminum and weighs 24 pounds, so at 42 cents a pound it is worth $10.  We only had two pounds of copper wire but it is worth $1.20 a pound.  There are large signs posted around the yard stating that stolen goods will not be purchased under any circumstances, but because copper is such a theft-worthy item, new customers bringing in copper wire must provide a drivers’ license and be fingerprinted.  Bill swipes his index finger across an electronic device.  In a classic case of gender discrimination, I escape suspicion of copper thievery.  We walk away from the trailer with $48.44 in cold, hard cash.

Over 83% of American steel is recycled, including 100% of junked automobiles.  This success story of recycling is accomplished not because of environmental concerns, but because it is economically advantageous to do so.  Every year we recycle more steel than paper, plastic, and glass combined.  Not only is recycling steel cheaper than mining raw materials, but it requires 75% less energy.  Recycling aluminum is even better, using only 5% as much energy as producing aluminum from bauxite ore.  Aluminum cans, which are worth 65 cents a pound, can be discarded, shredded, reformed into new cans, and be back in your fridge filled with a refreshing beverage in about 60 days.  Unfortunately, only about 58% of aluminum cans are recycled.

Having completed our business, Al invites us to come see his metal art.  Al used to be a Seattle real estate broker, but has clearly left that career path for a less encumbered lifestyle.  He lives at the back of the quarry in an old Greyhound bus which is elaborately decorated with his creations.  On the patio an assortment of colorful metal animals watch over a cast iron bathtub and a metal fire pit.  A salvaged candelabra completes the outdoor hot tub experience.  On the grill of the Greyhound is a colorful mermaid.  On the back of the bus is the perfect metaphor for metal recycling:  a red and blue Phoenix bird rising from the ashes.

If You Don't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

Published in the Sun November 12, 2011

Imagine your favorite big-box store invited you to go on a shopping spree. To make it more exciting, they took all the price tags off the goods.  “You don’t have to pay now.  Come back tomorrow and every day to get whatever you like, and we’ll send you a bill at the end of the month.”  Although the shopping would be great fun, the sticker shock at the end of the month might be a rude surprise.

Now think of the way we buy electricity.  We can have as much as we want, 24/7.  There are no price tags on the electricity flowing to our many machines.  If I want to leave the lights on all day while I’m at work, I can do it.  If it is more convenient to turn on a space heater than to put on a sweater, that’s OK too.  The bill won’t show up for weeks.  To use an animal psychology metaphor, it is kind of like if the dog barks every night, but you only spank him once a month.  He just doesn’t make the connection on an emotional level.  The consequences are remote from the action.

On my kitchen counter I have a little monitor called The Energy Detective.  It looks like an electric clock, but instead of telling time, it tells how many watts of electricity my house is using at any given moment.  It plugs into the wall and communicates through the wiring with a measuring device installed in the breaker box.  Right now, as I type on my computer, the Energy Detective reads 280 watts.  Those watts include the computer, the refrigerator, and some electric clocks.  The Energy Detective is not the same as the city electric meter.  The meter, if you can figure out how to read it, tells you how many kilowatt-hours you have used over a period of time.  The meter is like the odometer in your car; it tells you how far you have gone.  The Energy Detective is like the speedometer.  It tells you how fast you are using electricity right now.

If I turn on my electric oven, the Energy Detective jumps up to 3200 watts.  In hot weather the air conditioner could make it shoot up to 10,000 watts.  Those are the big power hogs, but all the little things add up too.  The television uses almost as much electricity when it is turned “off” as when it is on, because it is really in standby mode.  I tried unplugging every single electric thing I could find in the whole house, but I could only get the Energy Detective down to 50 watts, because some of the kitchen appliances that I can’t unplug are also in standby mode.  Fifty watts doesn’t sound like much, but every house in America is using 50 to 100 watts of electricity even when everything is supposedly turned off.  This persistent drain of power is called “phantom load.”  A phantom load of 100 watts adds up to 876,000 watt-hours of extra electricity per year, equivalent to an extra month of electric charges.  About 10% of all electricity generated in the United States is used for phantom loads.  That’s a lot of coal plants burning just so our TVs can be ready for us without warming up.

It turns out that when you can see how much electricity you are using, there is an immediate motivation to turn something off.  You can’t help yourself; you just want to turn something off.  It’s like operant conditioning.  The bell rings and the dog salivates.  Most people automatically decrease their energy usage by 5 to 20% once they see what they are using.  After all, the lights burning in an empty room don’t improve your quality of life, so why pay for them?  The best alternative energy is the energy we don’t use at all.

Home energy monitors are made by several different companies (Blue Line, Black and Decker) and most cost in the range of $50 to $120.  Fancier models can communicate with your computer or smart phone and notify you when usage is high.  A monitor will pay for itself in just a few months by decreasing your consumption of electricity.

Aquaponics

Published in the Sun October 30, 2011

Sometime around 1880, a Walburg farmer hand-dug a cistern to collect rainwater off his roof.  The cistern is big, about eight feet across and thirty feet deep, and completely lined with large stones.  It was built to last, and it has, for 130 years, but it is no longer used to collect rainwater.  If that farmer were to visit today he would be astonished to see what Bob and Janine Hall are doing with his cistern.

It starts with the Halls washing machine.  With several kids at home they run about twelve loads of laundry a week.  The graywater from the washing machine runs directly into the cistern.  There is a five foot opening covered with wire mesh at the top of the cistern, so you can easily look down and see the water, which looks very clean.  (Janine uses Seventh Generation laundry detergent, which is phosphate free.)  From the cistern the water is pumped into three 330 gallon tanks.  The tanks provide water for two raised gardening beds about the size and shape of pool tables.  But there is no soil in these beds; they are filled with river rock and crushed granite.  The first bed is crowded with lush, dark green tomato plants.  The other bed is newly planted with strawberries.

Both beds are equipped with an ingenious drain that allows them to automatically fill with water and then drain completely every two hours.  The surface of the gravel stays dry in the sunshine so that algae will not grow.  The tomato bed drains into a plastic pond stocked with forty small goldfish and some aquatic plants.  The pond water, which contains waste from the goldfish (and goldfish are prolific with waste) drains back into the cistern.

The ammonia waste from the fish provides nitrogen and other nutrients for the plants.  The plants, by consuming the nutrients as fertilizer, clean the water for the fish.  This symbiotic relationship between gardening and fish is called aquaponics.  The word aquaponics is a combination of the words “aquaculture”, which means fish-farming, and “hydroponics”, which means raising vegetables in nutrient-rich water.  As long as the fish and the plants are in balance, the water can be recycled through the process indefinitely.  Contrary to what you might think, aquaponics uses only 10% of the water that a dirt garden would consume.  Bob has used only washing machine water to keep his cistern filled all summer.  In fact, not only does the cistern provide water for the aquaponics system, but also for six baby fruit trees, three dogs, five goats, four sheep, three horses, and a flock of chickens.

Actually, the system just described was only Bob’s starter project.  Now he has built a large greenhouse holding five larger planting beds flourishing with peppers, lettuce, and broccoli.  There is also a hydroponic “raft” in which plants are suspended in the water without the stones.  Bob lifts up a lettuce to demonstrate the bare roots extending 12 inches into the water.  We follow the PVC pipe to a separate room at the end of the greenhouse housing a 550 gallon tank of tilapia.  The tilapia are more sensitive than goldfish, but can be harvested and eaten when they get big enough.  The tilapia reproduce in the tank.  The mother carries the eggs in her mouth until they hatch, and even after hatching she will protect hundreds of babies in her mouth until they can manage on their own.  A good aquaponics farmer can end up with a continuous supply of delicious and mercury-free fish for supper.

At one point the Halls had the tilapia outside in the goldfish pond, but unfortunately there were tragic consequences.  One night Janine noticed some movement around the pond.  Going closer with a light, she noticed a 5 foot water moccasin slithering out of the pond after a tasty snack.  Shining her light down into the cistern she saw more huge moccasins.  I wish I could have seen with my own eyes what happened next.  Bob fetched his shotgun and started blasting away into the cistern.  After the massacre they fished eight dead snakes out of the water.  But it was too late; most of their tilapia were gone.

Eventually Bob and Janine plan to sell produce from their aquaponic greenhouses, as well as provide themselves with all the fresh vegetables they can eat.  Bob says he can get 8-10 times the produce in half the time out of his aquaponic beds that he could get from his old dirt garden.  He can farm year round, and with aquaponics he doesn’t need pesticides or chemical fertilizers.  Plus there are no weeds to pull.

The Hall’s former dirt garden lies drought parched and abandoned beside the barn.  A chicken, searching for a bug she might have missed, scratches in the dust.

Graywater

Published in the Sun October 16, 2011

It breaks my heart to see the trees dying.  Trees define a temperate climate; there are no majestic trees in the desert.  Golden brown grass has a certain stoic beauty because we know that when at last it rains the grass will turn green again.  But when hundred year old trees die, they will not be restored by a little shower.

The heat may have let up, and we have even had a bit of rain, but it is unlikely that the extraordinary drought is over.  Did you know that nationwide, 50 to 70% of municipal water is used to irrigate home landscapes?  In Georgetown and Round Rock, that means that water is imported from Stillhouse Hollow, treated to be safe enough to drink, pumped to our houses using electricity, and then thrown on the grass.  What if this is a multi-year dry spell?  Are there ways that an individual could use water more effectively?  Could we still have trees?

People are starting to talk about graywater.  Graywater is water that has already been used in a home’s washing machine, showers and tubs, and bathroom sinks.  It is called graywater because it is not as contaminated as blackwater, which has been flushed down the toilet.  Water from the kitchen sink and dishwasher is also considered blackwater because of the large amount of food waste that may be present.  In some areas where drought is a way of life, graywater is used to flush toilets, but that requires some very sophisticated plumbing.  The most common use of graywater is to irrigate plants.

Paolo Pinto directed on-site sewage facility inspections for the Williamson County Health Department for 18 years, so he knows quite a bit about dirty water.  He has been using graywater on his trees and vegetable garden since his house was built in 1986.  Paolo has a large lot in the Chisholm Trail Utility District, which has been under severe watering restrictions all summer.  Although most of his neighborhood is wooded with native trees, the elms are wilting, and the live oaks don’t look so good either.  All is not lost though, because there is one factor working in favor of the trees:  Paolo’s graywater system.

Paolo’s shower and washing machine do not drain into his septic system.  Instead, they drain into a 50 gallon tank buried in his backyard, and from there by gravity into a hose that he can move from tree to tree as needed.  An eight minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water.  An average top-loading washing machine uses 41 gallons of water per load.  A bathroom faucet produces about 2 gallons per minute.  Excluding the blackwater going down the toilet and kitchen sink, an average American produces about 40 to 50 gallons of graywater every day.  An established tree needs approximately ten gallons of water per inch of trunk diameter every week, so if Paolo generates 50 gallons of graywater a day, he could water a different 5 inch diameter tree each day of the week.

Paolo is quick to point out that his graywater system would not comply with current state laws if it were being built today.  One new requirement is that a system must allow 100% of the graywater to be diverted into the sewer or septic system if necessary.  This is a very logical requirement.  If the ground is soggy from heavy rains, you would want to be able to turn off graywater irrigation.  Or what if there is a baby in the house and dirty diapers are regularly being washed?  Nobody wants diaper water going onto the lawn.

Another state regulation is that the graywater must not be sprayed and must not be allowed to pool or run into a neighbor’s yard, the street, or a natural body of water.  Care must be taken to avoid creating breeding habitat for mosquitoes.  The plumbing that carries graywater must be clearly distinguished as non-potable water, usually by making the pipes purple and posting signs.

Graywater does not adapt well to soaker hoses or drip irrigation because it has a lot of particles and lint that rapidly clog the openings.  Graywater should not be stored in a tank for more than 24 hours, because it contains soap, bits of food, and bacteria, so if it sits around it will stagnate into blackwater and it will stink.

The most effective (and lowest maintenance) graywater systems disperse the water underground as soon as it is generated into a mini drain field where trees are planted.  An anonymous city inspector told me that he has had an underground graywater system irrigating a row of peach trees for years and they look fantastic, even with no additional water this summer.  He does have to be careful about what kind of laundry soap he uses.  Most powdered laundry detergents are high in sodium, which can be harmful to plants.  Borax can also kill plants in even small quantities.  Once his wife got enthusiastic with bleach in the white loads and wiped out a big area of grass.  He also told me that currently there are no City of Georgetown regulations about graywater systems.  As long as the neighbors aren’t disturbed, the code enforcers won’t concern themselves with your laundry water.  Residential codes for graywater may be adopted in the future, but we don’t have them yet.

A graywater system can be a useful way to conserve water, but it is more complicated to install than it sounds, and there is a lot that can go wrong.  Before installing a system, figure out how much graywater your household would produce and how you would use it.  Consult with a plumber.  And don’t feel guilty if it just sounds like too much trouble.  Even if you don’t take advantage of your graywater, the city is already recycling it.  Treated effluent (cleaned up sewage) is used to irrigate the local golf courses.

A useful internet resource for graywater systems is Oasis Design, a California company that has been designing sustainable water and wastewater systems for many years.

Solar Water Heating

Published in the Sun October 1, 2011

In my yard is a large black garden hose.  On a sunny day, the water that comes out of that hose is as hot as coffee.  My plants don’t really appreciate the hot water, but it does make you think about the excessive solar energy that has lately been falling on us like a plague, and how it might be put to a useful purpose.

Back in 1891, when people still heated their weekly bath water on a wood stove, Clarence Kemp patented the first commercially available solar water heater.  The Climax Solar Water Heater consisted of a pine box, lined with black felt and covered with a pane of glass.  Inside the box were four iron tanks, painted black, which held a total of 32 gallons of water.  The Climax would be installed on a south facing roof and plumbed into the bathroom.  Mr. Kemp’s advertisement warns that under very sunny conditions the water almost boils.  With this contraption the lucky owner could “go home at night and find hot water for bath ready for you, on tap same as cold water… There is no delay and no expense for fuel.”

Over the next 30 years, many thousands of solar water heaters were installed in California and Florida, but by the 1930s the widespread availability of natural gas (and its subsidized low cost) killed the market for solar hot water.  The idea didn’t go away though.  In 1979, in a show of support for alternative energy, Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar collectors on the roof of the White House to provide hot water for the staff cafeteria.

Only five years later, Jeremy and Linda Gambell began building a home in Georgetown.  The cheapest option for water heating would have been natural gas, but the Gambell’s subdivision did not provide natural gas, so they were faced with a choice between the hassles of propane or the expense of electricity.  As newcomers from the snowy regions of New York, the Gambell’s were impressed by the reliability of Texas sunshine.  Or maybe they were just hippies, but they decided to buck the system and try solar water heating.

The water heater that Jeremy chose had advanced a long way beyond the Climax Solar Water Heater.  There are two 4x8 foot collector panels on his roof.  From the driveway they look almost like skylights.  Circulating through the collectors is a 50% propylene glycol solution, a foodsafe antifreeze.  The glycol is heated by the sun and is then pumped through a heat exchanger where it transfers the heat to the household water, which is stored in a regular 120 gallon hot water tank.  The water can stay hot in the insulated tank for several days.  A thermostat on the tank allows for back-up heating by electricity should the collectors fail to provide enough heat, such as might happen when we have several days in a row of cloudy weather.  It is not necessary for the weather to be hot for the panels to work.  A cold sunny day can heat water, just like the inside of your car can become quite warm even in the winter.

I asked the Gambells if they really have enough hot water.  Linda looked askance at Jeremy and said, “Well, there was that time you forgot to turn the breaker back on in the fall.”  It turns out that every spring, Jeremy turns the back-up electric water heater completely off, and doesn’t turn it on again until about November.  In other words, for most of the year, they don’t even use the back-up electricity at all; the solar collectors supply 100% of their hot water.  I was a bit incredulous.  Surely they must take their showers at night and just didn’t notice that the water was cool in the mornings?  Nope, they both take showers AND they do the laundry in the morning, and all through the hot season they have plenty of hot water.  Linda says she never worries about running out of hot water, but with the drought she does sometimes worry about running out of cold water.

The Gambells paid $3955 for their hot water system in 1985.  Every two years the “Solar Man” comes and changes the glycol solution for $42.50.  I recently bought a similar system and mine cost $4830, including the tank and installation.  There is a 30% federal tax credit, bringing the net cost down to $3381.  Mine won’t need the glycol exchanges, because it uses distilled water in the collectors.  If you would like to estimate your own return on investment in a solar water heater, there is an excellent lifetime cost calculator at www.solar-estimate.org that lets you plug in the rate you pay for electricity and the number of people in your family.  To make a long story short, by reducing electricity costs, a solar water heater will pay for itself in 4-10 years, depending on how much hot water you use and how fast electricity rates go up.

On average in the US, water heating accounts for 14% of total household energy consumption.  In a large family, the annual carbon dioxide emissions of the water heater can equal those of the family automobile.  The sun is going to shine on us anyway; we should put it to work.