It’s cold up north right now. Everything is covered in snow and ice which means that most of us are focused on our indoor hobbies and tasks. What most people don’t know is that this is the perfect time to start planning your alternative energy system.

It’s the perfect time for a number of reasons.

One – you have the time now. Hibernation after the hubbub of the holidays is the perfect time for all of your spring planning. You can work out your garden plan – figure out the timing of your seedling growth and planting and you can become more informed about renewable energy and potentially create a budget.

Two – this is the time when most renewable energy companies are in their slower period. That means more access to human resources to help you identify the right renewable energy option and for system design. It can also mean you have more control over installation timeframes with contractors and you can get better deals on components because they are looking to offload inventory!

Three – We all have to start some time! No matter your motivations – whether you want to save money, reduce your carbon footprint, reduce your fuel consumption or become energy independent, we can help you find the right path and the right system for your individual goal.

One of the coolest things about renewable energy these days is that you can look for solutions for electric power or for heat and hot water. While solar panels, or photovoltaic modules, and wind turbines are well known and popularized in mass media, solar thermal technology can actually be more cost effective and efficient for first time renewable energy buyers. In some cases though, solar electric power or wind power might be a great fit – but how the heck do you start?

Most people have no idea where to begin – and that’s totally understandable. In our world, you sign up with a company for a utility and then you just have to pay. Most people can’t decipher their bills or really understand how things are measured. They might see the change when they switch the more efficient light bulbs, for example, because the bill goes down, but they may not understand how electricity or oil is really measured.

Electricity:

Your electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours. An average household uses about 950 kilowatt-hours per month.

Some useful definitions:
• Kilowatt (kW) - A unit of measure that is a rate of electrical POWER; equal to 1,000 Watts.
• Kilowatt-hour (kWh) - A unit of ENERGY measurement equal to 1,000 Watt-hours. Commonly used as the unit for electrical energy commerce.

How do you know where your kilowatt hours are going?

Start with your own self assessment by making small investments in some cool gadgets.

Start with a Kill-O-Watt. This is a gadget that measures the energy consumption of your existing appliances. You can see how efficient your refrigerator, washer and television are. You basically plug the Kill-O-Watt into the wall and then plug your appliance into the Kill-O-Watt.

This is the first step towards becoming more energy efficient – identifying where your energy is going! Once you see which appliances need to be replaced, you can buy more energy efficient alternatives to lower your monthly kilowatt hours of usage.

Heat and Hot Water:

Solar electric panels and wind turbines can be more expensive than your expecting, so if you have older heating and hot water systems in your home, solar air heating or solar water heating system might be a more inexpensive way to start on the renewable energy path.

Solar water heating collectors typically mount on your roof like a solar electric panel but use the power of the sun to heat water for a hot water heating system. A solar air heater can be mounted on the roof but actually works better if mounted on a southern wall. But, just like electric systems, you need to know what you’re using and make it optimally efficient before you start installing solar technology.

A great place to start is with a digital thermostat. By installing a programmable thermostat in your home, you can keep your oil or other fuel costs lower by ensuring that your thermostat defaults to a reasonable temperature and doesn’t heat up the house during the hours when people aren’t there. Almost anyone can install one of these thermostats and they are available for less than $50.00!

The other thing to do is see if you can get an efficiency assessment of your home. They will tell you if you need to improve your insulation, windows or even your furnace or boiler. When your home is efficient you can decide which kind of system will work best for you.

If you live in the great white north, chances are you are in full on hibernation mode. It can get kind of depressing but there are ways out of it. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and I’ve been learning about what I can do in my own backyard to improve the earth. This has lead me to one of my favorite projects - I am planning my garden – and planning a larger project at the same time.

Sure, it’s January, but what better time is there?

I’ve started my own brand of activism by suggesting and now planning and orchestrating a community garden project.

We have a group of families in my town that are good friends. Some we’ve met through our children, others we’ve met through circumstance. A few of us are avid gardeners. This year, rather than each manning our own beds, we’re going to try something a little different. We’re going to share the labor and the literal fruits of those labors.

We’ll each choose a group of crops and then as they come into season, we’ll have our own miniature farm share. We’ll also experiment with some canning and preserving as we go so we have some for the fall, winter and spring. For my community gardeners, I’m going to make a list of the common crops that are easy for all of use to grow, the right season and then we’ll all get together and divvy up the goodies.

I am taking my own planning and vegetable beds to the next level, planning my soil preparation and crop growth and swapping for the whole season.

How do I know how to do this? Well, for my own garden, I know where my bed was last year and I think I know how to expand it this year for maximum yield. I’m getting some great guidance from a great book: How to Grow More Vegetables (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) *Then You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons.

This book is basically a manual for stretching your small piece of land into a vegetable producing powerhouse. We’re talking 100 square feet packed with everything from cherries to chard to potatoes! I can’t wait!

I’m also planning according to the local crops where I live. For instance I am surrounded by orchards in central Massachusetts and by small farms that produce fabulous corn crops. So I won’t be buying and planting an apple tree and I also won’t be working with corn. Instead, I’m going to choose hardy options that will withstand my beginner clumsiness!

The winter is a great time to plan out what you want to do because you can budget, layout and maximize your growing season. Also, its fun to look forward to warming weather and getting my hands back in the dirt. I grew a nice variety of veggies last summer and I look forward to experimenting with even more this year.

After all, one of the best ways to create a more sustainable society is to sustain yourself!

We’re all bombarded with doomsday messages these days about the polar ice cap and the poor bee colonies. More folks are buying reusable grocery bags, conserving fuel and making some smaller and smarter decisions. Researching renewable energy technology like solar electric, wind turbines and geo-thermal can get very overwhelming if you aren’t an engineer. How the heck do you really start going green?

The first things to do are really super simple. And anyone in the solar power or wind turbine business should tell you the same thing – conserve. Why this first step? Because in order to ultimately invest in an alternative energy technology, you need to know how much power you actually need. If you just slap a solar electric system on your house before you make your house efficient, you are just perpetuating the usage and need for too much power.

Step One:
Turn stuff off! Turn off lights and AC when you aren’t using it directly. Plug those pesky silent energy drainers into a power strip and turn the strip off at night. Replace whichever bulbs you can with Compact Fluorescent. Wait until your old incandescent bulbs burn out and replace old technology with new. As your old appliances fail, or when you have the resources, replace them with new, Energy Saver models.

If you really want to get serious on evaluating your power usage, you can also grab a Kill-A-Watt, which is a gadget you plug into the wall, and then you plug your appliance into the Kill-O-Watt. Leave your appliance plugged in for a couple of weeks and you can figure out how much you are paying per billing cycle per appliance. This can help you quickly find out which of your existing or old appliances are the worst energy hogs – helping you to make smarter decisions about what to replace first!

Step Two:
Once you have reduced your power consumption and you’ve worked through replacing appliances and light bulbs, look at the construction of your home. Do you have old leaky windows? How thick is your insulation? Do you have conifers planted on your home’s windward side and deciduous trees planted on the southerly side? Do you have a solar powered attic fan helping to vent the hot air from your attic in the summer to keep your AC from working so hard?

Make sure your home isn’t leaky and can hold heat in the winter and stay cooler in the summer. By making your home “tighter” you’ll need less energy to modulate the interior temperature and you’ll all me more comfortable.

Step Three:
Now you can consider the most cost effective alternative energy technology in terms of getting a return on your investment. Solar thermal is the way to go! Whether you want to look at installing a solar air heater as a supplemental heat source for 700 square feet of your home, or a solar water heater to remove heating water from your oil or natural gas heating needs, these systems are not only comparable in price with traditional technologies, but also will yield a return on your investment within a few years!

At the end of the day, these three steps will get you well on your way to being less energy consumptive and less dependent on fossil fuels. Going green, unless you have a lot of money to invest, is something that takes time so treat it that way. Build up gradually and then you’ll know when it’s time to really explore introducing solar electric, wind electric or even hydro electric power.