Mission: Find out about making my home a Solar Powered self-sufficient Green Power node

Now I'm off to a local company armed with pictures and measurements of our house to find out about Solar panel installation costs and how much energy we could possibly generate to run our home, and charge our future electric car(s), and could we even generate enough electricity every year to sell back to the Power Grid and generate income for our family...I'll let you know what I find out when I get back !


***June 7th Update***   The place I went for advice was Northwest Mechanical, Inc. They are located at:


3024 NE 145th Street
Shoreline, WA 98155
(206) 267-HEAT


http://www.nwmechanical.com/


Their Solar specific site is:


http://smartsolarsolution.com/home.html


If you want to see if your home is viable for solar power harvesting, go here at fill out the form:


http://smartsolarsolution.com/quoterequest.html

I met with Jeremy Keller, Design Engineer. The first thing we would do would be to get $100 Solar Site Assessment to see if our house [roof] is even ideally oriented correctly. Ideally you want to have south-facing roof area, where you intend to put the solar-energy collector panels. Our two largest roof sections are southwest and southeast. So it may work.

Depending on what you want to do, collecting enough solar energy to power your hot water heating requirements, and/or generating enough electricity to do that and power your house, you may be able to do that. The best thing to do is get your power company bill in *.pdf [Adobe Acrobat] format and email it to Jeremy, to see if it would be feasible to generate all of your power needs.

You can email Jeremy at: jeremy@nwmechanical.com

***June 15th, 2010 UPDATE***

I'm probably going to read a few books to get me more up to speed to see if we can really make our home Solar powered: