Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Bruce Johnson Living Solar in the Suburbs  September 5, 2012 UP764  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those folks and other sponsors, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Wisconsin Public Television, and the Science Alliance here at UW-Madison, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Usually, Bruce Johnson is behind that camera up there. Tonight, he's going to be behind this lectern down here, because he's our speaker tonight on "Living Solar in the Suburbs." Bruce is a 1981 graduate of Boston University's College of Communication. He's been continuously employed in broadcast television for the past 32 years. He's worked extensively in commercial, public and corporate settings. 

He has traveled on assignments in Russia, other parts of Europe, Africa, Mexico, and all across the United States. He writes for magazines and blogs with well over 100 articles to his credit. He's a founding editor of the website: provideocoalition.com He has presented on video related topics at seminars in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, and Des Moines, Iowa, among other places. For the last ten years, his primary assignment with Wisconsin Public Television has been with the Digital Innovations Unit, which counts among its products the program series entitled "University Place," which explains why you'll find him almost every Wednesday evening at the back of this lecture hall, directing coverage of Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Bruce lives on the far east side of Madison, and on September 1, he celebrated his 25th anniversary at Wisconsin Public Television. Way to go. His presentation tonight does not deal with video production, but with another passion of his life, solar power, and how it can fit into almost anyone's life. Please join me in welcoming Bruce to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [applause]  >> Hi, I'm usually back there, but now I'm up here. There are a couple of things. 

I've been speaking just enough to know that there are a couple of things that I do that drive people crazy. Number one is that I mumble. Number two is that I talk really fast. I'm trying to control myself, but anything goes over your head or you just can't get it, don't feel bad about slowing me down. Believe me, it's nothing I haven't heard before. So, with that out of the way-- In fact, I'll say this. I do work for Wisconsin Public Television, but nothing I say tonight should be construed as coming from Wisconsin Public Television. This is my side gig. It's not what I do, and it certainly has nothing to do with they think of what I do in my side gig, or something like that. So, let's get moving. 

Why me? I'm a 54-year-old lifelong geek. I love technology. I have a couple of sayings I use over and over and over again, one of which is, I really truly believe in my heart of hearts that technology can save us, if we only let it. There are many, many people in this world who just don't want it to happen that way. A lot of people have entrenched interests. There's a lot of people who make a lot of money on the way things are, and they don't want to see that change. I personally don't have any time for that. The whole solar thing came to be because-- How many people in this room own a house? Did you ever change the roof on your house? Not many, I'm surprised. I'll tell the story in a little more detail in a second. That's where it came from. 

I needed a roof. And where's the intersection of roof and geekery? Solar panels is the intersection of roof and geekery. It wasn't inexpensive to do this, but by the same token, I'm in it for the long haul. I wanted to make an investment. This is not something that's going to pay itself back in a financial quarter. I knew that going in. So here's the story. When I was a kid in the '60s and '70s, I wanted to be a geek. I was sort of a proto-geek. There were a lot more outlets for that kind of stuff, oddly enough, back then. 

This thing on the screen here, on the PowerPoint, can anybody tell me what the name that Radio Shack used to call these things? They were called P-Box kits. You get this plastic box with holes in the top. Inside the box were all the parts you needed to make something, like a radio or a stereo amplifier, something like that. I tried to make about ten of these things, and not one of them worked. [laughter] I think it had something to do with my really terrible soldering ability, or the fact that I was using a soldering iron the size of a Volvo. But I tried. I really, really tried. I never quite took off, but I really, really tried. The other thing was that, I'm not a math person. I feel terrible saying that in public, because you know, everybody expects that everybody at least has a pretty good grasp of math. 

I mean, my sophomore daughter in high school is taking Trig this year. It took me four years to pass Algebra I in high school, in Milford, New Hampshire. So there's a message there somewhere. I'm not sure what it was. The thing is, it all translates into geekery is a lot of math. This is a digital PDQ-8. When I was in high school in Milford, New Hampshire, we had one of these things in the math lab, and people who couldn't pass Algebra I in four years weren't allowed to touch it. [laughter] Very, very frustrating for me. But you know what, I think I got over it. >> What did it do? >> That's one of the very, very first real computers. 

It was built in Massachusetts. And they gave one to our high school for some reason. I'm going to get away from my history and start going forward. We're going to talk about energy tonight. We're going to talk about a lot of the parts that go around with energy. To do that, you have to define some terms. I know I'm getting ahead of the story here, but I think it's important, because a lot of these terms will come up in the conversation as we go along. Photovoltaic. Anybody want to take a shot at what photovoltaic is? Ma'am? [inaudible] Very good. Specifically in this case, it's a solar panel. 

It's a solar panel that takes the sun from the sky, and turns it directly into electricity. Next one. What's a kilowatt hour? Nobody wants to bite into that one. I don't blame you, either. Oh, Tom wants to. >> A unit of energy. >> It's a unit of energy. Can you give me a little more? I think the judges are going to say you have be a little more specific than that. Think about this. Think about this. 

The lights on the ceiling up here, they could be, they're not, but they could be 1000-watt lights. A watt is a unit of energy. If you lit a 1000-watt light bulb for an hour, it's used one kilowatt, 1000 watts. That's the basic measurement standard for billing you, basically, for electricity, measuring how much electricity is used in a situation. SDHW, anybody want to take this one? Solar Domestic Hot Water, a very, very cool technology we'll talk about in a moment here. Anyone want to guess what a Therm is? [inaudible] Uh, no, not really. A unit of heat energy. If you ever look at your utility bill, and I know you all read your utility bill religiously, that is what you are billed for. A therm is 100 cubic feet of natural gas. And roughly speaking, it has the energy in it of 100,000 BTUs. 

If you've ever looked at your water heater or something like that, or if you have a plate on the side that says how many BTUs it uses, that's how much energy it can generate in an hour, basically. And a therm is a billable subset of that. Off the grid. Anybody want to take a shot at that one? [inaudible] Exactly right. You do not partake of the utilities that are available to you in your area. There are some people who do this as a matter of ethics, or just plain stubbornness. There are some people who do it because it costs so much money to run electricity from the pole out there to their house two miles over there, that it sort of makes sense. I did a story, probably ten or 12 years ago now down in Brooklyn, Wisconsin, that a house back then was entirely off the grid. But what they didn't talk about very much, because it also had a backup propane generator, which I get the impression ran a lot, especially in the winter. Net Metering. 

Nobody's going to get this one. If you have solar panels, or if you have a windmill on your house, or some other way to generate electricity, if you're generating more electricity than your house is using, where does the extra electricity going? It goes back into the grid. It's just like water in a hose. If you pump enough pressure in there, it goes out and goes out to the other parts of the world that can use your electricity. Basically, you're powering your neighborhood, and that's a cool thing. I'll show you what Net Metering does to your meter here in a minute. Grid Intertie. We're getting seriously geeky now. That's what net metering is. It's taking your generation and interties it into the grid. 

It's nothing more difficult than that. The last thing we go to is Time of Use Metering. Does anybody here have time of use metering? You have time of use metering, Tom? [inaudible] Basically speaking, MG&E does it, I do it. We'll talk more about this later on, but it's paying different amounts of money for your electricity, depending on what time of the day or the week you're using it. If you are the right kind of person, you can save real money doing that. All right, let's keep moving. Who here can tell me, roughly speaking, not including the various monthly fees or daily fees you pay, how much does one kilowatt of electricity cost? Or what it costs me, this is my bill. Twelve cents. Anybody else want to bid something else? Thirteen cents, we have 13 cents. Nobody else wants to go there. 

Well, you know what, here's the answer for me. Click that thing again. Electricity for me costs 16 cents a kilowatt hour. You'll say, but Bruce, MG&E tells you that the electricity service out there says it only costs ten cents a kilowatt hour. But that's not the whole story. First of all, that's what MG&E charges you. But to get the electricity from some distant generating plant to MG&E's territory, they pay three cents per kilowatt hour to a company called American Transmission, which is building those lovely towers out on the Beltline. Well, you know, I tell people all the time when they say those things look ugly, I say, where do you think electricity comes from? Electricity comes from distances and you have to haul it someplace on wires. I mean, if you didn't want them to build towers like that, you better have solar panels on your houses and make it locally instead of shipping it in from someplace else. Now to be fair to ATC, even if everybody in Madison had solar panels, it wouldn't have stopped them from building the towers here, because it's a bigger world than just Madison. 

I know the people who live here, myself included, that's a hard concept to get around. [LAUGHTER] But it's true. So anyway, there's three cents added on. So that's 13 cents. And if you look at the bottom line there, which is obscured by my really bad blue box, it says Green Power Tomorrow. Who here is on the Green Power Tomorrow program? What do we do for that? We pay 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour more to theoretically source our electricity from renewable sources. Now, we all know that electricity is not, just because I like that wind turbine up in Fond du Lac that's going around, my electricity does not come from it. It's a theoretical concept. But it does cost more to do that, now at least, than to use conventional coal and gas and other generations. Okay, it's good thing. 

So you add those three together, 16 cents a kilowatt hour. Keep that in mind because solar's not there yet, but we're getting there. If you want to have solar panels, I tell people there are things you should do first. The easy things you should do first. I'll even mention this brand name here which is just taboo. When you added the addition onto our house, which you can must basically see on the right-hand side, we built the deck on as well, and when the sun shone, it just blew through that window and that glass door like you wouldn't believe. The amount of heat that came into the house was astounding. So we got a SunSetter awning. It's been up for 10 years now. It's holding its own. 

It's getting a little ratty, but it's going to be up for another year or two. The amount of energy that piece of white fabric keeps out of my house is incalculable. The difference between a sunny day with that up and then down in the dining room, which is right behind that glass door, insane. So if you're in a situation where you can block sunshine to keep your house cool, great thing to do. This also includes, obviously, curtains and things like that. In the winter, it includes thermal curtains or thermal drapes to keep the heat in, as opposed to running out. Something else I tell people all the time, how many people here have clotheslines? Oh, please, are you serious? I have an assignment for everybody who doesn't have a clothesline, next time it's time to do laundry, somebody goes down to the dryer and waits by the button and the other person goes to the electric meter and stares at it and says "go." And the person pushes the button, and what you see will knock your socks off. Your electric meter will take off like a rocket. I mean, like this. Seriously. 

The amount of electricity that electric dryers use is incredible. It's even more, believe it or not, than it takes for me to charge my electric car. So if you want to have solar panels, seriously, seriously, think about having laundry on a line for starters. You'll save a lot of money in electricity. How many people here live in places that say you can't have a clothesline? I want somebody to go to court and fight that because the FCC has a rule that says that homeowner's associations cannot tell you, you can't have a television antenna on your house, and that is law in the United States. Why can that law not apply to clotheslines? Why can that law not apply to solar panels? In some places in Madison, which will remain nameless, they can't have solar panels. The homeowner's association says nope, can't do that, it would look weird. I can't personally imagine that, but once again, I'm from Madison. What can I tell you? Let's keep moving. Anybody ever used one of these things? It's called a kilowatt. 

You plug in something that uses electricity, you plug it in and then you plug the unit into the kilowatt and plug the kilowatt into the wall. And over time, it measures the amount of electricity that your device uses. Plug it into your refrigerator some time. It's a real eye-opener. Unfortunately, this has a limitation that you can only use it on 120-volt devices. If you plug this thing into a dryer or if you plugged it into an electric stove, it would be triple eye-opening. It's just astounding amounts of electricity go through those suckers. You can, if you're interested in finding how much you are using, I understand these things are on loan at the local public libraries. You don't have to buy one. If you wanted to buy one, they're like 25 bucks. 

And I'm using it right here to actually measure the amount of time my gas hot water heater runs so I can get a feel for how much gas it's using over time. Something else we'll talk about later on in the show. Here's my house. It's on the far east side of Madison, not quite to the interstate. It was built in '72 just like all the houses around it. If you walk around my neighborhood with your eyes really open and consider what you're looking at, you'll see there are basically five styles of houses in my neighborhood for miles around. This is, of course, one of the raised ranches. And if you notice where my front door is there, everything around it is sort of cantilevered out. And that's the major difference in all the houses is that there is either a cantilever, or a really deep cantilever, or no cantilever at all. But the garage will switch sides and the living room will switch sides, but the houses are all the same. 

So anyway, it was very popular back in 1972. I bought it in 1994 with my wife when we got married. It's a great neighborhood right down the street from Elvehjem Elementary. I like it a lot. We added an addition in 2003 because we had a couple of kids and it was getting a little tight. But the funny thing is, with the exception of the addition, most of the roof had never been replaced up until 2007. Thirty-five years out of the shingles and the plywood which is unheard of, but I've got a piece of video to show you why that's a bad idea. This is what the laundry room looked like, and the laundry room is, of course, the core of the house. You'll notice that your furnace and your water heater are always in the middle of the house so they can be efficiently routed in different directions and everything has the shortest route possible. By the time we got there, we had, I laughingly call it an efficient furnace. 

While it did have a PVC pipe for a chimney like furnaces do today, it was a maintenance nightmare and the gas bills were ridiculous. So that was due for replacement as well. And the chimney in the middle, by the way this is a stitch of a couple of pictures, and if you look at the chimney, it looks like a pyramid. So it's a really terrible stitch. But you'll notice that the only thing going up the chimney is the gas water heater. Gas water heaters have been efficient for a decade now, or longer. You can do those out of PVC as well. So there's really no reason to keep the chimney, not to mention the fact that who wants to tuck point a chimney these days if you don't have to have one. So, in 2006, Focus on Energy was a very, very large player in the energy business. They're much less so now just due to the way politics has worked over the last couple of years. 

They were offering rebates on renewable energy projects. They have these fliers they'd hand out. This was for solar electric. You can't read it, obviously, because it's tiny little type. And they had another one for solar water heating systems. And I was pretty interested in this. I wasn't sure that my house was a good candidate for this, but I figured I'd give it a shot. So, eventually I found out, and the other thing was that there were tax rebates available, on top of the Focus rebates there were tax credits, which are money you take off the money that you owe in taxes. It's not a rebate directly from the government. It just reduces the amount of tax you pay in a given year. 

They would pay for 30% of a project, up to $2,000 which, if you do the math in your head, it's not too hard to get to $2,000 at 30%. Today, there is no cap which makes these processes a lot more interesting for a lot of people. Now, I have to say, this one is, again, just as much as I am not representing Public Television when I say these things, I am also not an accountant. My accountant would tell me that I should not even be talking about this. So if you're interested in this, please, please go talk to your accountant. Focus also put together lists of vendors that you could use to do you project, but that's not where you start. This is a list from back in 2006, and if you could read it very well you'd see that a lot of these guys are spread all over the state. There's only a couple from Madison, and the one that I picked was Full Spectrum Solar which, at the time, was in this incubator space over off of Baldwin Street. Now they have their own building over on East Wash with a big sign you can see. They're very interesting folks. 

They've done really well by me, and at the time of the list of people I had to choose from, they were the only group of people that did both solar hot water and solar PVs. PV, by the way, photovoltaics. So, I got three bids. They came in very competitive, but once again, they were the only people that were going to do both sides. They pretty much got the gig by default. And there was, at the time, from Focus on Energy, a 60% off renewable energy site assessment coupon that made this thing pretty easy to get started with because I thought, what would it cost to do this? Well, the guy who came out, did a great job and he did a really big study on my house, and it came in about an inch thick of paper. So they really, really did a good job. Now, I want to stop here for a second. Between 2007 and today, one of the greatest changes that has happened in the world is the death of chemical photography. This may feel like a digression, but it really has something to do with my lecture because I shot so many pictures of this stuff being put on my roof and holes being drilled in my house that I could have done a really, really great job of documenting this for any crowd I could talk to. 

If I could find them. [LAUGHTER] Chemical photography, what did you do? You took the can down to Walgreen's or Woodman's and they gave you back what? Physical pieces of paper with pictures on them. I have CDs full of pictures that I just cannot put my fingers on. So, I may well be a photographer but I am no librarian. [LAUGHTER] The solar assessment goes like this. This device is a very, very cool device called a solar pathfinder. I understand they have digital versions right now, but this old analog version looks pretty cool to me. It's got a glass dome on the top, and you'll see better in a second. What's underneath it is a scribed grid that shows you the various months of the year and the times of the day during the months of the year when the sun will hit a given spot. So here you go. 

I'm jumping forward again here to show you the site profile that came out of the report they made for my house, but you've got to get a feel for the territory. The addition was what everybody was looking at to put the solar panels on. You see south solar site and north solar site there? The problem with the north solar site is that it doesn't face the sun at all, and even I could see that. I was a little concerned they were going to put something on and it wouldn't work. But anyway, that's not the way it all turned out. So anyway, this is my kind of artwork. My kids with crayons could have done a better job, but here's what they come up with. What their site survey does not show you is the topography of my house. One of the reasons why my wife and I bought the house was because it wasn't just your normal flat land in a suburb. It was, as we called it at the time, topographically interesting. 

Of course, we didn't give any thought at the time that when it really, really rains hard, water comes down that hill and runs into your house. But we were young and stupid, and in the meantime we've patched up most of the cracks. But anyway, the problem with the house is the house is at the bottom of a hill, and on the top of the hill to the southeast, which is where a lot of the sunshine comes from, is a really, really, really big tree. And that's one of the reasons why I thought there's no way in the world this place is any good for solar energy. But this is where the solar pathfinder comes in. This is what the solar pathfinder does. I'll see if I can make my mouse work here. Down here there's a compass. If you look closely, you can see that it is pointing directly south, and what this tells you is that all these shadows up here are my trees in my backyard, many of which I would love to cut down, but as I don't own any of them that would probably be a bad idea. Right here, you see that from 6:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night those all correspond to time of day. 

And these lines here, it says December, January, November, February, October, March, September. That predicts how much sunshine any spot will get at any time of the day at any given month. Now, if this isn't the coolest technology in the world, I don't know what is. But anyway, this describes for the person looking at it the solar hole on my roof facing south. And you see, it says up here the grid says percent sun per month, reduction due to shading. In January, I only get 31% sun. In July, I get 92% sun. And believe me, I tell people this all the time, nothing will make you pay attention to the angle of the sun more than getting solar panels because you have a financial interest in where that thing is all the time. So, that's the solar pathfinder. This is what it looks like facing south. 

This is what it looks like facing north on the other side. The hole is considerably more constricted, especially right over into here. I'm glad they didn't eventually point anything that direction because it would have been not exactly optimal. But for this, the service cost $450. Focus on Energy paid $270 of it. I paid $180 for this service. At the time, I said $180, but, like I said, with hindsight in the long view, absolutely worth every nickel. And once again, here's a picture of the site profile. This is what they came up with. And it shows the various points. 

Now, you see right here, where did my cursor go? Here's the south solar site. The original installer was talking about putting photovoltaics here and putting hot water panels on the north solar site. That all changed because there was a lot of acreage right over here that was just not being used. And when they took the chimney out, it was all nice and flat so that's a good place to put solar panels, and that's actually where it all ended up. Now, the other thing they put in the report was an analysis of my energy usage over the previous year, actually year and a half. And the things I want you to look out for are here. And look what I circled right here. This is July. This is my electricity use in July of 2006. Up to 1500 kilowatt hours in a month. 

That's a lot of electricity. That's a lot of electricity. Now, in July what's pushing that? >> Air conditioning. >> Air conditioning. Absolutely. Fans are your friends. I've come to that conclusion. This is my natural gas report. I'm going to show you the opposite here. Look what's going on in July, August, September. 

I'm using 10 to 20 therms, remember therm is a hundred cubic feet of gas, in the middle of the summertime when I'm not running the heater. All that's running is the hot water and possibly the stove. The amount of gas you use for cooking barely makes a blip, at least in my house. So keep that in mind. We're going to come back to that. I say that a lot, don't I? They made a recommendation of what they wanted to put up there, and it was a 96-foot solar thermal system. I'll show you pictures later on. And they wanted to put it on the north solar site. That idea disappeared. I'm glad to hear that. 

The photovoltaic system, they were going to put on the south solar site. That also disappeared. But it was going to be 2,800 watts. That's a pretty decent chunk of electricity, but it's not the way it turned out, which is fine. The quotations, what did I pay for this? You're all asking yourself. The original cost of the systems that eventually did get installed with 2,400 watts of photovoltaics was $22,500. They estimated the Focus rebate at $2,310. And the federal tax credit was 30% of $20,000 is way, way more than $2,000. So it was capped off at $2,000. That's all I got from the feds was $2,000. 

Hot water, $9900. The Focus rebate brought it down to $7800. And then I got $2,000 from the feds as well on that, so that brought it down to $5800. Now, here's some video. I like this stuff. Now, I want you to watch this. Where did my cursor go? There it is. They're going to take off the chimney right before your eyes. I could watch this all day. [LAUGHTER] Now, the chimney, the reason they took the chimney off is because that's where all of the wiring and all of the piping went down straight into my utility room. 

This was the easiest run these guys have ever had. And of course, then they had to take the rest of the roof off, and, once again, I could watch this stuff all day. The process of doing the roof took about a week because they had a couple of rainy days in the middle. I have some video of the tarps on top just flapping around, and I'm thinking how can you keep water out of that thing? >> Was there a dumpster on the far side? >> There was a dumpster in my driveway on the opposite side. Now, here is why you don't wait 35 years to re-roof your house. Watch this guy. Watch this guy closely. It's not a very long clip, so pay attention. He's peeling that stuff up with his hands. It was so delaminated he didn't need tools to take it off the roof. 

It was pretty impressive to watch these guys. They'd run across the top of the roof and come back, in the wind, come back with a piece of plywood flying over their heads and just slap it down. But when it was a sunny day like this, it was a pretty good process. >> Did your trusses have any damage? >> No, the trusses were fine, oddly enough. Actually, the section back here where the addition was was the only piece that had ever been replaced because there had been some water damage there a long while ago. But of all the rest of the roof, that's the only piece that had ever been replaced. So, the PV guys showed up and started working. You can't really see it in this video, but there are little dimples, basically, placed on the roof. And they have an aluminum kind of a cone and then a rubber grommet and an aluminum mount point stuck in there. And then they put these things in a line and they run rails across them, and you screw the solar panels to the rails. 

But here they are putting on the last of the original group of solar panels. The first set was 1745 watt solar panels for a total of about 2,400 watts. It was really fun to start watching this stuff work. It was something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime, but I did. There were also parts on the inside. One of the things to know about solar panels is that they do not create AC as you would have it come out of the wall socket. They create DC, direct current. And they can make an awful lot of it. It is very, very dangerous stuff. It can kill you quite easily. 

But this device is called an inverter and its job is to take whatever voltage of DC that's coming off the roof and, you have to understand, all of those 17 panels are running in a string, they're all strung together so they can make a lot of voltage and a lot of amps, and it would convert it to AC which would be injected into the grid. And it also brought it down to a reasonable voltage and amperage. So, this device controls 17 panels, and it's been pretty bullet proof so far. It's made in Germany. It's called the Sunny Boy Inverter. I don't know what they were thinking when they named it. And, of course, I've come to the very strong conclusion that if you decide to do something like this and you don't get some sort of metering to see what you're doing, you're wasting your time because you get a real internal glow when you say holy cow, I made 26 kilowatt hours of juice today. You wouldn't even know that if you didn't invest in some metering. And it's just absolutely worth the trouble. This was my first piece of metering. 

It was a hand-held device. It has solar panel on the back and a little antenna stuck up it. It was wireless. It kind of worked on Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, it died when the dog knocked it off the table. So that was the end of that until we, we'll go back to metering later on. And, of course, the same time they put on the PVs they also put on solar hot water panels. I'm going to show you the chart of how it works. It's not as complicated as it looks. But this is very detailed. 

If you look up here, these are the solar panels on the roof, and you don't run water through them, you run antifreeze through them. It's an organic, it's not organic, it's non-poisonous kind of antifreeze. And what happens is it gets heated up in the panels up there, goes down through a separator, goes down through a temperature gauge so you can tell how hot it really is, then it goes through a stainless steel coil down here in the solar hot water tank. And then, obviously, it transfers the heat into the water inside the tank, goes back out through a pump. This little pump here is absolutely silent. It only runs when the antifreeze is hotter than the water in the tank. So it doesn't waste energy that way, and it barely uses energy anyway. And then it goes back up through here, back into the panels for another loop. This is a very effective technology, a very effective technology. This is my tank, right here. 

It's 80 gallons. Here's the gauge that shows you what the temperature of the water is coming out of the tank. Here's the picture I shot of it last night after my oldest daughter had taken a shower. The temperature inside the tank was 175 degrees, and yesterday wasn't a ridiculously sunny day. The angle was really good. And the way that the panels are set up on my roof, the afternoon is when you want it to be sunny because it just sucks the sun into these things. Now, the temperature you get out of the tap or out of the shower head is not 175 degrees, luckily. That would be a very, very bad thing because downstream from this pipe there's a thing called a tempering valve where you set a knob on it to an approximation of a maximum temperature you think you'd want it to be at. And I turned mine to where it's supposed to be, 120 degrees give or take. So what it does is it takes the hot water out of the hot water tank and mixes it with cold water coming in to bring it down to the temperature that won't scald you or create terrible burns on you just when you're taking a shower. 

As far as technology is concerned, uh-oh, I've got to plug it in, I think this is probably the best I've ever seen. I love my PVs, I really, really do, but I think my solar hot water panels are even cooler than my PVs. And they were a lot less expensive. Now, the problem was this. Remember I showed you the picture of the kilowatt the other day, or a couple slides ago? You can take a kilowatt and plug it into any 120-volt device. How do you measure how much gas anything has used? There's only one gas meter in your house. And they don't sell kilowatts for gas. So basically speaking, you have to take it on faith that this thing is doing a really, really good job of not using gas. There were a lot of inspections involved here, and finally we got them all. And, as I say to people all the time, there are few things as much fun to watch as this. 

Can you see this? That's my electric meter going backwards. Now, as a photographer for 33 years, you'd think I'd be able to focus the thing. [LAUGHTER] But it wasn't that simple. Now it's getting better. Yes, there is my electric meter going backwards. And, I've got to tell you, I've seen it go backwards three times faster than this. This is just sort of a medium okay day. You can really, really make that thing fly backwards. Except for now I can't because I have an electronic meter that doesn't have the disk anymore. It's a little bit harder to get joy out of that as it was from this thing. 

So, did I get my rebates? Yes I did. I was predicted at $2310 rebate from Focus on the PVs. They actually gave me $2995. Now, that's the kind of bargain you don't see every day. They added an extra $600 on there. That was nice of them. They predicted $2100 for the hot water, and I got $2100. So you only get lucky once, apparently. So the next step was this. Back then, in 2007, MG&E had capacity in their buyback program. 

Their buyback program is a deal where instead of paying you what it costs retail to buy electricity, basically what's called an avoided use where I'm using electricity off my panels and not buying it from them. It's sort of an avoided use. They actually count how much electricity I make and pay me 25 cents a kilowatt hour for it, which, at the time, was roughly twice retail. And they had real good reasons for doing that. They wanted to encourage people to do this. I'll say this for MG&E, as utilities go, they're pretty forward-thinking. I'm very impressed, and I have to admit that I'm a stockholder as well. But they really seem to believe in this stuff, and they believe in solar and they believe in wind and biomass and all the other things that go around. More than some utilities that I could mention and will not. So anyway, the thing is, when they wanted to count the electricity coming off my roof, I had to have a second electric meter to do it. 

The one on the left is the electricity coming in meter. The one on the right is the electricity coming off my roof meter. And that one runs backwards all the time. So you can get a lot of fun watching that sometimes. It also required another bill. It cost another $1200 to have that second meter installed. So, the total costs for my first photovoltaic system were about $18,700. And they were talking about a 13-year payback. I think it's going to be longer than that. A couple things have happened that nobody would have expected back then. 

First of all, the cost of natural gas has gone way down. It was a dollar a therm back then. Now it's about 60 cents. So, that doesn't work in my favor. By the same token, that doesn't mean what I'm doing is not the right thing to do. It's still the right thing to do. So electricity has not gotten cheaper, oddly enough. It's gotten a little bit more expensive. But I think the payback is still going to be in the 14-15 year range. And in the five years it's been running, I've made 12.6 megawatts, megawatt hours, of electricity. 

When you add that up, it's about a thousand bucks, I think. It's going slower than I want it to, but, by the same token, my solar panels have a 25-year warranty, and they are reasonably expected to last 50 years. So they'll be pumping out juice for a long time to come, and eventually those two curves will meet. I'm not in any hurry. I've also saved 21,522 pounds of CO2. And if you think the idea of how big is 100 cubic feet of gas is ephemeral, how big is a pound of CO2? How much air is that? I have never found a good explanation of what that is. But, you know what? That's 10 tons. That's good. Solar hot water system costs $5800 over all. Once again, I've said before, there's really no way to determine what the exact avoided amount of gas I've used is. 

But by the same token, we do have some numbers to play with. Remember I told you to remember these numbers? This is where my electricity was in 2006 when I was using 1500 watts in the summertime. This is my last two years. The blue line is 2012. The red line is 2011. And I don't use anything near that electricity anymore. And my overall use has gone down a lot. And part of that, I think, is the solar panels, part of that is being aware of turning things off. My family has suffered long about me running around turning lights off. I remember my dad did that to me and I thought it was the worst thing in the world. 

I get it now. So anyway, yes, my electric usage has gone down considerably. Natural gas, remember I showed you this was the minimum I was using was about 15 or 20 therms in the summertime? In the summertime, I used two or three therms of gas now. I mean, almost nothing. And if it wasn't for the fact that there was a daily service charge to supply gas to my house, I'd be paying $2 a month for gas in the summer. So, obviously, I'm making some money somewhere. Now, what would Mae West say about all of this? Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. So once you get addicted to this stuff, it's like any other drug. You want more. And I had been for a very, very long time in the market for looking for the advent of the electric car. 

And about two years ago when Nissan announced the Leaf and Chevy started working on the Volt, it was looking like the time was coming. But before we get to there, we have to talk about metering. Remember I said metering is the most important thing because you really, really, really want to know what you're doing. I'm not advertising eGauge here, but they do a great job for me. This is a little box that lives inside your electrical box. And it's wired in by guys wearing really, really big gloves so they don't kill themselves. But what it does is this is a little web server, and you plug this into your electrical box and you plug it into the Internet and anywhere in the world I can type in the right URL and look at how much electricity I'm using at that very second. And believe me, the fact that I can see whether the air conditioning is on in my house is another thing that my family is not too thrilled about. [LAUGHTER] Now, if you look at this, this is the read-out. This is from June sometime, and I'll show you the various parts here. 

The red is electricity that's coming from the grid. The green is electricity that's being generated by the solar panels I have. And this was a little bit after I'd put the second set of solar panels on. You see this little spike right here? There's time along the bottom, and this is 6:00 AM right there and it says 9:00 AM right there. So about 8:00 in the morning the sun hit the panels, and it just goes off like a rocket. At this time of the day, which was only like 3:00 in the afternoon, I had generated 17 kilowatt hours but had only used 13.8 which is exactly what I want to see as much as possible. I'll show you a couple of different parts here though. This spike right here, this big red spike, that is the charger for the Nissan Leaf that I own now. The Nissan Leaf has a 24-kilowatt battery. Excuse me, 24-kilowatt hour battery. 

It has a 3.3-kilowatt charger on board. So basically speaking, to charge it from zero to the very, very top, which you never do because you never drive the thing empty, could take as long as six hours. This thing charged, let's see, about two hours. So it probably added about 20 miles of range to the car. That's what that looks like. This spike right here, I think that's probably, no that's not the dryer. That's the car. The dryer actually spikes a little bit higher than this. The dryer draws more electricity than the car does. I'm not sure what that is. 

But you can see things, like in the morning this spike right here has got to be the microwave oven or the toaster. You get to recognize these things over time. Actually, that's in the evening. That's something else, like the microwave oven. So anyway, knowledge is power except when people hate you for it. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, I wanted to get an electric car. And I have one outside if anybody wants to take a little spin around Henry Mall, maybe we'll work that out. There were two choices basically. They had the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt. Can anybody succinctly tell me what the difference is between the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt? >> The Volt is a hybrid. 

>> The Volt is a hybrid. The Volt has a gas engine in it. Whereas, the Leaf is a pure electric vehicle. There's no exhaust pipe on this car which drives people nuts. My Volt has been to the gas station three times. It got washed every time. I thought, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, what better way than to use solar energy to charge your transportation? And that's where we're at. But to do that effectively I had to have more PV capacity. 2.4 kilowatt hours was not going to be enough to have really true carbon-free driving, and the Volt, literally for me, is not carbon-free driving. In April 2010 they opened up reservations. 

They did not make them available all across the country for starters. It was Washington, Oregon, California, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, I think was all the states. And then, of course, in 2011 there was the small problem of the earthquake and tsunami which destroyed their plant which pushed them back another year. Now, I'm not complaining about that. That was a horrible thing, but patience is not one of my greatest virtues. But it finally did show up on June 6th. So basically, as of tomorrow, I've had the car exactly three months. But I had to put more solar panels on the roof to make it worthwhile. So I got Full Spectrum to put another 7850 watts on my roof. Now remember, the first set of panels I had was 17 145-watt panels. 

They're made by Sharp in Japan. They're very good. I like them. They've been doing their job absolutely reliably. People say what's the maintenance on your solar system? And the answer is you get up on the roof once every three months, and you wash them off with a squeegee. That's all there is to it. Nothing else needs to be done. >> What about snow? >> We'll get there. The question was, what about snow, and we will get there. There was no more Focus money to do this thing but the federal rebate had the cap lifted which is a really, really good thing. 

And, at the same time, the cost of solar panels have come down a lot. A paid, basically, $17,500 for my first 2,400 watts. They cost about $729 a watt. My second system was 1750 for $7800, $449 a watt. Basically dropped in half. And, although there are some questions of tariffs being put on solar panels possibly, that trend is continuing. The cost of panels are going down. Here's part of my system. You see it says there are 7 250-watt panels, but you only see 5. The other two are just on the other side of the roof, but I couldn't really show them very well, on the left-hand side of the roof. 

These are made in Milwaukee of all places. I'm happy to say. They, once again, have also been absolutely, totally dead simple to use. There's nothing to do. And instead of having that one big box inverter that I showed you, the big gray box named the Sunny Boy, each panel here has a microinverter on it. So basically speaking, on the back of this panel mounted to the frame is a tiny little inverter that on the roof turns the DC into AC. And it just gets injected directly into my electrical system. A lot simpler, and also a lot more modular because if you think about it, if my inverter decides to go and get sick, all 17 panels are out of business. Whereas, if one of the inverters on these panels goes out of business, first of all it reports itself on the web, this little page that tells you what it's doing, and also, the rest of the panels keep working just fine. So that's a technological leap, actually, in the last five years. 

The inverter for my first system is actually well oversized because I told them I wanted it to be extensible. But by the time I got ready to extend it, the technology had leapfrogged that and you couldn't even buy panels that would work with it anymore. Makes me a little bit sad, but having said that, it's got another 20 years of life span so I'm not going to complain. These are my seven new panels. And when you add the new panels to the old panels, my total capacity is 1450 watts. In the time that I've had these things, up until last night, they've generated 667 kilowatt hours of electricity. Please remember that number because it's going to come in handy in a couple minutes. I've had these online since the middle of May, and they've got 667 kilowatts. What happened in July that was rather unusual for this neighborhood? Thirty-seven straight days of pure sunshine. If you're into solar power, this was the year for you. 

If you're into eating, not so much. [LAUGHTER] So, do I have a solar powered car? Well, you see it says right there the circle around there says in the time since I first bought the car, which was 6/6/2012 until yesterday, both systems together generated 1.64 megawatt hours of electricity. 1.64 megawatt hours of electricity. So, do I have a solar powered car? The license plate says it's solar powered. Am I just bragging here? If you look at the numbers here, you see we've driven it, in three months, 2,628 miles at 4.7 miles per kilowatt hour which comes down to 559 kilowatt hours used in the car. Not only have we made three times the amount of electricity we need to drive this thing, basically speaking, not literally but basically speaking, all that electricity came from my seven new panels which basically cost $1,000 a piece. And that is carbon-free driving. And I can't tell you how much I giggle every time I drive this thing. It's just a blast. And by the way, it's a car. 

After you get used to it, you just totally forget that it's different than anything else other than the fact that when you put it into normal mode and you stomp on the accelerator you can out-accelerate everything except a Porsche. This thing takes off from 0 to 40 faster than anything on the road. And sometimes you need that, but sometimes it's just fun. [LAUGHTER] What don't they tell you about? They don't tell you about snow. I spoke to a group of people a couple of months ago who were all hot and hip to get their solar systems up and running. And I said to them, how many of you like going on your roof in the wintertime? And nobody raised their hand. Anybody here want to go on their roof in the wintertime? The only reason you can see my solar panels in this picture is because I was up on my roof and I shoveled these things. It's not safe. I don't recommend it, but I have a financial investment and I'm going to optimize it every chance I get. Also, I have a very shallow-pitched roof which makes all the difference in the world. 

I would not go up there if there wasn't like four inches of snow on there because if you go up there with boots on and the snow is kind of wet, you're going to stay on the roof. But you do have to get up there and do it. The hot water panels are pitched at 45 degrees, and they don't self-clear. The snow sticks to them like nobody's business. I have to say, I've been tempted to go up there and try to take maybe one of the panels and put Rain-X on it just to see if things would slide off better. I'm not sure whether that would reduce the transmissivity of the medium, however. But on the hot water panels it might not matter too much. So it might be a fun experiment before winter comes around. >> Could you rig a canvas shade or something? >> You could probably shade them and then peel them up after it snows, but then you've still got to go up on the roof to do that. Sir? >> My thermal panels are at 60 degrees, and in 10 years I've only had to shovel the snow off them once. 

And the sun is way low in the wintertime so I have a 90-degree angle. >> That's almost vertical. Yours are probably at 60 degrees, the statement was that he has thermal panels that are at 60 degrees, and they cleared themselves. But the thing is, 60 degrees is like this, more or less. And, once again, when the sun is low in the sky and it hits them just like that, it is a direct hit, and because they're so vertical, gravity is going to yank the snow off. At 45 degrees, I guarantee that wouldn't happen, from personal experience. And I was shocked when it didn't happen. The other thing that can really, really stick the snow to it is if you get a little water underneath it before it snows and it freezes. That's no fun. So it's dangerous and life-threatening, but it's solar energy. 

[LAUGHTER] I'm just a little crazy. Now, what do we do to optimize ourselves even if you don't do solar energy? Time-of-use metering is something that I have recently adopted and I've really gotten to enjoy. If you look at this grid, all the gray boxes, Monday through Friday, basically from 10:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night are what's called prime time in MG&E time of use setup where you pay 27 cents per kilowatt hour. All the white stuff, on the other hand, you only pay seven cents per kilowatt hour. Can anybody guess when I charge my electric car? From 2:00 in the morning until 6:00. Now, having said that, I'm off-setting all of that electricity I'm buying with the electricity I'm generating. So, it's kind of a shell game, but the thing is, I'm making enough to offset my usage by far. And you saw the front of my house, I'm lucky enough that the back of my house is where you put all the stuff. If all the stuff was on the front of my house, I'm sure my wife would not be nearly has happy with it as she is. But choices have to be made, and the sun is where it is. 

You can't really change that very much. I got lucky. We did not buy the house with this in mind. I do LED lighting. Who here does LED lights? Excellent. This is my bathroom light testing facility. [LAUGHTER] These three ones, where did my cursor go? There it is. This one and this one and this one over here I bought like six years ago from a company called Think Geek, and they were really inexpensive. They were also really, really blue and really, really spotty and really, really ugly. And thank god they burned out really fast. 

So that wasn't such a great deal. This one here and this one here are both big globe CFLs, compact fluorescents. This one burned out fast. This one didn't burn out so fast. This is also a CFL right here. They're okay. I'm not knocked out by them. They take a little time to warm up. On the other hand, I wish my cursor would come back, this one right here is a clear globe that I got from Costco. They were three for like $15. 

Very bright, slightly blue, but they need to have some sort of filter on it. This one right here is the best bulb I've ever seen. This is a 14-watt Toshiba I got at Menards for about $17 on sale. It says it's a 40-watt. To my eye it has the light output, the lumens by the way, of a 60-watt bulb easily. As a matter of fact, in my wife and kids' bathroom on the backside of this wall, I took out all of their CFLs and put in four of those. So what's four times 14? 56 watts put out so much that you're blinded in there, and it's going to last forever. I have not had an LED bulb fail yet. Except for these early ones, the crappy ones, I have not had an LED fail. This is my dining room light test facility. 

These are four cans. It's a company you should know in LED lighting. The company's name is Cree, C-R-E-E. They make the best LEDs you've ever seen. These four lights replaced four cans with incandescent lights in them of 75 watts. Each one of these lights is 10 watts, has a much more pleasing light and a much brighter light, is fully dimmable, and I can expect them to last longer than I'll live in the house. And they're going to save their cost in electricity time again over the next 20 years. I paid $50 a piece for these. About three months later, Focus on Energy came out with a 50% off rebate program I didn't get to take advantage of sadly. If you can put these things in your ceiling for 25 bucks, they're dead simple to install, they go right into the old socket, and they just have a beautiful, pleasing light you wouldn't believe. 

Insulate, insulate, insulate. Who here has insulation? Oh, that's not a very large number, I'm sorry. In that house right there, in the roof right there, there's 18 inches of chopped fiberglass up there. It has really, really made a difference between the time we started and where we're at now. We have fairly new windows. Although, people will say that the most important thing you can do is replace your windows. If you read closely, about the least efficient thing you can do is replace your windows because a hole in the wall is a hole in the wall whether you put glass in front of it or not. But be reasonable about it. And of course, there's the clothesline again. Conserve, conserve, conserve. 

I turn lights off constantly. I try to do the best I can. If you looked at the output of the metering I have, you'll see that over night my electricity usage bobs between 250 and 400 watts constantly. And I figure it's got to be, a large chunk of that is refrigerator. I have a very small freezer as well which is usually full of stuff but should probably be fuller. And other things that turn on and off like pumps and things. I would love to get down to 100 watts, although I have to confess, I don't know how you would do it. I'm trying to be efficient, and, once again, data is your friend in this world. If you can figure out a way to figure out how much electricity you're using. It's easier to lose usage if you know what all the usage is. 

If you're interested in doing this, our friends over at the Willy Street Co-Op are doing a group solar purchase project. The deadline for this round, I think, is the end of September. But they are managing to negotiate remarkable drops in cost for solar energy stuff, for panels and for electronics and everything. I went to a seminar. They seem to have their act together very, very nicely. So if you're interested, the URL is down there: WillyStreet.Coop/ group_solar_project If you go look at their web page, it doesn't cost anything. Here's my thanks page. Thanks to Tom Zinnen and Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Tina Hauser, my colleague from University Place. Irene Ekleberry, an absolutely unsung hero who close captions each and every show we do. 

The woman is a saint. Lynn DeRolf, who's sitting back there directing, covering me today. The folks at Full Spectrum Solar who couldn't have been nicer to me all along. MG&E has been a great utility to work with. Jim Feeley is a friend of mine who used to be my editor when I was writing for magazines. I went to a seminar once and I listened to these people talk about broadcasting is this and broadcasting is that, and just from listening to them I could hear from their voices they had no idea what broadcasting was at all, and I stood up and said that. And Jim Feeley was in the room, and he said, do you want to write for me? And I said sure. And we've been friends ever since. And my long-suffering family who has not seen the last of me running around and turning lights off after them. [LAUGHTER] That's it. 

[APPLAUSE]