We go our solar panels about three years ago, and we love having them, we are hoping to eventually get more!

We built Rivendell, our net-zero solar home in Harvard in 2017 and moved in by Christmas. Each year our solar panels generate almost 20 megawatt hours of electricity - enough to heat, cool and illuminate our home, cook our food (induction stove top), and feed our electric vehicles (Chevy Bolts). In addition we feed 2 megawatt hours of EXCESS back to National Grid. We burn no petroleum products and have 32 kilowatt hours of battery storage to run our home overnight or in the event of a power interruption. Our air source heat pump regulates the environment in summer and winter, with a woodstove for back-up in arctic conditions. Twelve inches of (open and closed cell) spray foam insulation keeps the outside and inside air separate.

We have always composted our food into these big barells in our backyard. Recently, our local dump has started to accept compost as well, so now we have another place to put it. It allowed for more people to compost and we now bring compost down to the dump almost every week.

I switched to electric lawn trimmer, weed wacker and blower about a year ago, much quieter and easy to start.

My wife and I have had at least one electric car since 2016 when we had an original Nissan Leaf that had 80 miles of range; driving from San Francisco to Sacramento (90 miles) was an adventure. The cars are so good now we have had no gas cars since 2020. It is charged up every morning; never needs an oil change, timing belt, or transmission work; and is very capable. 

We finished installing our new geothermal heating and cooling system in late March. With summers getting hotter, we are incredibly grateful to have this efficient system to cool our home. We typically dislike using AC unless absolutely needed but this sytem is so gentle, uniform, and quiet, that you hardly know that it is on. This is in complete contrast to the old system which was loud and created cold pockets. Plus, my husband just commented that we were able to sell electricity back to NG in  June because of our rooftop solar panels. I don't think we were able to do this last year when we used our old outdoor AC units for cooling. I think that we will be equally pleased once we use geothermal to heat our home this fall and winter.