My husband and I want to be better citizens of the planet. We want to do, "that green thing" as I've heard it called. But we don't want to go extreme. It's like a diet, if you go too extreme, you're more likely to fail. What I mean is that we want to reduce our carbon footprint and our overall consumption of fossil fuels, but we don't want to live in a house with all the blinds shut and lights out to save energy. We don't want to live in eighty-degrees in the house in summer and sixty degrees in winter either. What we'd like to do is consume less energy, but do so in a targeted way.
We had a three-fold plan. First, we looked at swapping our light bulbs to LED versions. Since up to 40% of a home's electric bill can be lights alone, we hope we can make a significant impact in our consumption there. We're still swapping out light bulbs. There are more bulbs in our house than we could have imagined. We've hit the highest use ones so far and are incrementally doing the rest.
Secondly, we really wanted to add solar panels to the house. Solar power is an excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint over time. We had our house evaluated and from the initial evaluation we realized quickly that we weren't going to be able to get 100% efficiency due to the angle of the home, pitch of the roof and surrounding trees. Regardless, we said, we still wanted to do it. It was a good thing to do, even if the return on investment wasn't that great. And then we got the numbers back. And we were sad. The numbers weren't great or good. They were just bad. Even the sales person said he wouldn't do it if it were his house. So solar is on hold for now, but we haven't taken it off the table.
Lastly, we wanted to get an electric car. My eight cylinder sports sedan was less than carbon-friendly, not to mention quite the consumer of expensive premium gasoline. So we ordered an electric car some tine ago and today we got that car. There are several fully electric cars but the one we went with had the best range and other merits that we felt made it the best choice for us. We now have a black Tesla in the garage and a fancy outlet on the back wall for charging it.
We were hoping to have a solar solution so we could even charge our car with the sun, but that's not happening this year. My children like the car. They mostly like it because the center console is something like a big iPad that they can touch and do things to. They also like it because they can sit in the front trunk, otherwise known as the "frunk". They can do this safely in the garage, even if the car is on, because it doesn't belch toxic fumes.
The Big Boy Update: He has an, "I want" problem. He gets into these situations where the only thing that comes out of his mouth are sentences that start with the two words, "I want". When this happens, he's trying to control you, the situation, and everyone around him. It's been a challenge to deal with him when he gets like this. This morning (I won't give you the long story) I was counting sentences that started with those two words and he was well aware that if he hit ten, there would be consequences. There were consequences. He almost got to ten a second time, which would have been a "stop the car" type event. He knew what he was doing because he stopped when he realized he wasn't going to get his I want way. I walked him in to camp this morning and told his two very capable teachers that, "he was having some strong feelings and it had been a challenging morning."
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter loves to go to the grocery store with me. We went the other day and as we were walking down one aisle she looked over and said, "Ahh! It's oil." She was right. It was a bottle of canola oil. How did she...oh, because she cooks with daddy all the time. Now I get it.
No comments:
Post a Comment