Friday, January 11, 2008

a mid-January perspective

I'm glad we kept the gas system. Thse days, we keep it on pilot, and I just go down to the basement & turn it up when needed. Within 10-15 minutes, the water is hot enough to shower in. And then I go turn it down, and wait for the sun to shine again! Of course, on the sunny days, the solar collectors & storage system has proved adequate for our 2 morning showers.

At some point, we'll hookup the electric backup with timer & watt meter. Or, we can do some plumbing to feed the gas system from the solar storage tank so it only needs to bring the temperature up from 95 to 115.

The gas dryer remains un-installed. We now have another set of indoor clotheslines installed in our bedroom, which is filled with potted plants as well. The humidifier is used only occasionally now.

For Sep & Oct '07, our gas usage was 3ccf each month. It was 16 & 44ccf in 2006. So I'm estimating that our gas hot water used under 200ccf annually; quite an efficient little system, in retrospect.

No comments: