My wife and I just got back from our first ever trip to the Southwest. She's always been fascinated by cacti and wanted to see them "au natural".
It was a great trip. The weather was perfect (86 F, low humidity, sunny).
Here's the thing.
Living here in Iowa, I'm starting to look for a solar hot water heat contractor to put one on my roof. Domestic solar hot water is one of the easiest and quickest pay offs for solar energy.
In Tucson, we saw acres of new homes with cute, orange tile roofs. It looks like Tucson gets lots of sun, most of the time. But... I didn't see even one solar collector for domestic hot water. I'm sure the people in Tucson must take a lot of showers and wash a lot of clothes. They must all be doing it with natural gas or electricity near as I could tell.
Its not right. Solar domestic hot water would pay off really quickly in such a climate. Somehow, the way builders go after a low purchase price is causing home owners to lock themselves into an ever escalating cost for fossil fuel energy.
I'm not sure what would work to be better. I've heard an idea of setting up special mortgage treatment for such systems so that it just becomes part of the house. For builders to do this voluntarily would mean that their purchase price would look higher than a competitor's (which is why it is the way it is now).
Let's just pick a number of a 5 year payback (got to be better than that in Tucson). Anybody got ideas on how we could stop building brand new homes that miss out on the best solar technology out there?
It was a great trip. The weather was perfect (86 F, low humidity, sunny).
Here's the thing.
Living here in Iowa, I'm starting to look for a solar hot water heat contractor to put one on my roof. Domestic solar hot water is one of the easiest and quickest pay offs for solar energy.
In Tucson, we saw acres of new homes with cute, orange tile roofs. It looks like Tucson gets lots of sun, most of the time. But... I didn't see even one solar collector for domestic hot water. I'm sure the people in Tucson must take a lot of showers and wash a lot of clothes. They must all be doing it with natural gas or electricity near as I could tell.
Its not right. Solar domestic hot water would pay off really quickly in such a climate. Somehow, the way builders go after a low purchase price is causing home owners to lock themselves into an ever escalating cost for fossil fuel energy.
I'm not sure what would work to be better. I've heard an idea of setting up special mortgage treatment for such systems so that it just becomes part of the house. For builders to do this voluntarily would mean that their purchase price would look higher than a competitor's (which is why it is the way it is now).
Let's just pick a number of a 5 year payback (got to be better than that in Tucson). Anybody got ideas on how we could stop building brand new homes that miss out on the best solar technology out there?