I just wrote a post about it on my blog. It’s ridiculous. We have much longer and colder winters up here too. Half of my property is heated with propane and half is electric. Thanks for listening. I “dropped” on you too.

What if we all diverted money from our 401k’s long enough to buy a home power system? I went to a solar energy sales seminar the other day, and the salesman said a solar electric system had a 10-15% annual return. No one is getting anything like that in the stock market.

A solar thermal system is the one that can help lower your heating bill. Yes, it takes an investment mentality, because the system won’t pay for itself for five years or more (unless energy costs spike up rapidly, again)…but isn’t that the kind of long-term thinking that incrementally improves the world?

Permanently lowered utility bills sounds frugal to me. And I think we all like the idea of being more independent from the whims of energy costs.

I wouldn’t mind seeing an article along these lines, someday…to include GLBL taking estimates on putting solar panels up on that all-electric roof, and reporting back to your congregation on the process and calculations.

Thank you for educating me with your works.

I’m not sure a heat pump is the best option for where I live. It’s cold.

What Mark is talking about above is more specifically a Ground Source Heat Pump. So if you already have a heat pump, then it’s either ground source or air source. Either way, you may want to try to find out if it’s already large enough to heat your whole house if only the distribution was in place. If it is, then this is great news because it effectively lowers your cost for electrical heating by as much as a factor of 4 depending on the seasonal average coefficient of performance.

Nope, no utility bill info, but I should have asked for it. It wouldn’t have made a difference, we would have purchased the home anyway.

Programmable thermostats are inexpensive; it might be worth trying one just to see if it would help. Once everyone in is bed and under lots of covers, the ambient temperature can drop pretty low without causing discomfort. I leave my heat off at night, period, and preheat the bed with a heating pad — I understand an electric blanket is cost-effective to run, but I prefer a down comforter and a couple of cotton blankets. Possibly another option is simply to stay out of the parts of the house that are difficult or expensive to heat: have the family gather in one or two rooms during the day and leave the rest of the building unheated; use a space heater to warm the bathroom (keep it far from where water can get on it) when you have to shower or bathe; and put plenty of blankets on the beds.

You can get timers and motion-sensitive switches for some lights. There’s a gadget you screw into the socket of a closet ceiling fixture, for example, that makes the fixture motion-sensitive. This solves the problem of wandering off and leaving the closet light burning. I think they work on some regular lamps, too. That would cause the lights to go out (eventually) after the kids leave a room.

My former mother-in-law had one of those free-standing metal wood fireplaces put into her decrepit built-from-a-kit house in Colorado. The cost couldn’t have been that big a deal: she didn’t have a nickel or a dime to rub together. She had to have a brick pad put down on the floor to give it a fire-proof place to stand, and they punched a hole in an exterior wall (I think…or possibly the roof) and ran a metal pipe outside to serve as a chimney. As I recall, she was very pleased with it.