The 10 Year Challenge

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Below you see our plan for energy independence. This plan is absolutely a work in progress and will be updated as we research and evolve our thinking, try different ideas out, and learn from what we’ve done.

Education and Awareness: The first step for us has been to understand our usage patterns.  As we posted in The Basics and  First Steps, our first order of business is to measure how much energy we use. 

Steps we’ve taken so far:

1. Become familiar with our home energy usage, both electricity and natural gas, by actually reading our utility bills. 
2. Reading information online and in print publications such as Home Power Magazine and Mother Earth News.

Future steps:

1. Have a home energy audit done.
2. Start logging miles driven per month on our vehicles.  We plan to start this the month of September 2008.

Electricity Usage

Steps taken so far:

1. Reviewed our day-by-day electricity usage chart on the Puget Sound Energy site to understand usage patterns.
2. Become more diligent about turning things off.  Working with our little kids to teach them the same (it can be tough to teach this to a two-year old who find it fun to turn lights on).
3. Swapped out old incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs. We easily replaced over 40 bulbs in our house, costing around $200 since we required a number of expensive, special bulbs for dimmers.
4. Joined the Puget Sound Energy Green Power Program, buying in for 100% of our electricity usage. 
5. Installed a clothes line.
6. Keep the greenhouse off the grid by purchasing a solar exhaust fan (we’re going with passive convection via temperature-controlled vents in the eaves).
7. Power cycle off some appliances (plasma TV, hifi) at power strip instead of using ’standby’ mode. 

Future steps:

1. Review the usage of each of our appliances, though we think most are already Energy Star appliances.
2. Determine if we should install power strips with off switches prevent unintended energy trickles from appliances.
3. Continue to research solar, with the intent to start making investments in two or three years.
4. Improve house insulation.  Even though our furnace is natural gas, the furnace does have an electric fan.

Natural Gas Usage 

Steps taken so far:

1. Reviewed our month by month natural gas usage.  Usage is very low in the summer months because we only have a natural gas cook-top and natural gas furnace using natural gas energy.
2. Acknowledged bad habits that need to be improved when the cold weather sets in. 
3. Set maximum thermostat level to 67 degrees (Sandy’s not happy about this).
4. Occasionally build a fire in the fireplace (we have lots of well seasoned hardwood from sickly non-native trees that have been cut down over the years).
5. Replaced extremely inefficient (and leaky) gas water heater with a high-efficiency (90% efficient) Marathon lifetime electric heater.

Future steps:

1. Improving house insulation (need to finish a few projects in the attic crawlspace prior to this occurring).
2. Add blinds in the kitchen / family room areas to reduce heat loss through windows.
3. Investigating geothermal heat pumps as a possible future replacement option.

Gasoline Usage

Steps taken so far:

1. Carpooling more often.
2. Trying to combine trips/take fewer trips.
3. Raised tire pressure on both vehicles to maximum rating (for vehicles, not for tires).

Future steps:

1. Start monthly mileage logs.
2. Investigate future electric car purchase. 

Homesteading

Steps taken so far:

1. Planted various fruits (fruit trees, blueberry bushes, strawberries, kiwi, grape).
2. Built a passive solar green house.
3. Built one raised vegetable bed. Planted tomatoes, cucumber, and red pepper plans in the Topsy Turvey planters.
4. Built three lettuce boxes.
5. Set up a food composter.
6. Built a chicken coop for five chickens.
7. Expand water harvesting system (added 330 gallon system off of greenhouse).
8. Build more raised beds.
9. Purchased 16 wine barrels for strategic planting.
10. Replaced rotten cedar roof with standing seam metal roof (lifetime) – best solution for mounting solar collectors as well as for water harvesting.
11. Set up new seedling grow shelf using LCD grow lights.

Future steps:

1. Finish ‘lasagne’ garden for ‘three sisters’ planting (corn, beans, gourds) – ‘lasagne’ is being built from leaves / recycled cardboard / goat droppings & straw
2. Further expansion of water harvesting (install 220 gallon system off of house roof).
3. Plant additional / replacement apple trees.
4. Build root celler (location TBD).
5. Build new vineyard (Sandy wants grapes, Derek wants hops) between driveway and pasture.

 Sandy and Derek