Posted on 02/21/2006 10:24:44 AM PST by SmithL
Hate to burst their bubble but propane is not "renewable".
Technically neither is Solar...when it's gone, it (and us) are gone for good!
In Minnesota, there a some dairy farmers who use cow manure manure to power an anaerobic digestor.
They provide plenty of power for their farms and often sell power to local co-ops.
It's not a bad idea - if you can afford the upfront money to construct the digestor. It's a practical use and environmentally-friendly way of disposing of cow manure.
It's saving us thousands.
Don't blame her for the reporter's mistakes. Propane is an on-site backup to her other systems. Don't knock it, at times I've lived "off grid" for months at a time, and enjoyed all of the modern conveniences.
Electricity must be expensive out west. I could pay my electric bill for more than 30 years for what this cost. Hope there's no maintenance.
ping for later
Ah, but methane is: especially in that part of California, apparently.
"It's saving us thousands."
Thousands???
Just exactly how BIG is your house? :-)
I wish I could talk Mrs. Red into a pellet stove, she likes the open fire too much...
Propane costs have also gone through the roof lately. A good friend has converted his new house back from freestanding propane to - brace yourself - baseboard electric. "You gotta be kidding me," sez I. "Nope," sez he, and shows me the numbers to prove it. He's down to a propane generator as a backup and all-electric otherwise. This is in rural Idaho. Sheesh.
When you do the math, that works out to about 4 tons of pellets for the whole winter or $800. Our next door neighbor with a house similar to ours spent $700 on natural gas last month.
See post 14.
We're doing a similar thing here, heating with a '70's vintage Vermont Castings woodstove. Total cost for the stove and installation: $250. I go through somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 cord per week. My cost for the wood is only in fuel for the truck, saw and splitter. We normally spend about $1500 on oil between November and April. This year it will be about 10% of that.
Wood is good.
Yeah, but how much mess is the ash? That's the reason I got a gas log firelace instead of a "real" one. Just flick a switch and instant fire.
A full weeks worth of ash can be fit into a coffee can with room left over.
I don't know, it seems kind of pricey for a feel-good kind of expenditure. Nuclear-generated electricity wholesales for around 3 cents per kwhr. Assuming an average household using about 1 kwhr at any given time, on average, $23,000 buys you a little over 87 years' worth of electricity. Unless you are planning on passing your homestead along for a couple of generations, you probably aren't going to realize much payback in an average homeowner's lifetime.
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