Electricity

STORIES

Fuel-Free Primary Heat

One of the two biggest challenges in reducing the climate impact of our off-grid home is heating (the other being transportation). For...

More PV Generation

Our next step was to add more PV generation. With only 2kW DC solar, it took all the daylight on a sunny day to run our modest daytime...

Clothes Drying

A clothesline is a classic way to dry clothing. Ours is right by the house, strung between trees, and in our climate clothes hung outside...

Indoor Air Quality

With a super-airtight house, indoor air quality is a big concern. When the windows and vents are all closed, we get headaches, even...

Off-Grid Solar

When we bought our 1200 square foot off-grid house in 2020, it had a small photovoltaic system. The system was designed for a single...

LED lighting

LED lighting is near and dear to my heart, I'll admit, because I knew graduate students when I was in the PhD program at UC Santa Barbara...

Switch to electric cooking from burning fuel

When we bought our house, it had several propane appliances (stove, water heater, and fireplace). Our intention has been to move to...

Fuel-Free Back Up Power

Usually PV systems are backed up with generators, but they are loud, burn fuel, and are inconvenient and expensive to buy and to run. We...

Radiant heat

We found that the existing dark tile/concrete slab floor was always colder than the air, and was unpleasantly cold in the winter. It did...

Add lithium ion batteries to PV system

When we began upgrading the off-grid PV system on our new mountain home, our first priority was to add more energy storage, and for the...

Super-insulated house

Our house was built to be thermally efficient, and was featured in a case study by Larry Kinney entitled "Clean Mountain Living" in the...

Downsize

Our first step in reducing our climate footprint was to downsize our living space when our last child went to college. We had moved from...