The Pulse Blog

By: Greg Murry
So you want to cut your ties to the energy grid?  Being free of the power grid with freedom from utility bills, and the self-sufficient satisfaction that comes from generating all you need sounds great, but in reality may be an impossible dream for most. The setup of most typical older homes require tens of thousands of dollars of investment to make a complete "Green Change". Solar panels, solar hot water equipment, geothermal or ground-source heating and cooling, wind turbines and so on are solutions but may be expensive to implement as a whole solution.  In the case homes in remote areas, it can be a major undertaking or something you accept as your chosen lifestyle.  Remote properties do have solutions but generally require good planning. Usually, options of choice in suburbia is to "dip the toe" so that you can still reduce your environmental impact and make saving on your power bill and eco-impact. So, here are a few ways you can make a difference at home.

Get Efficient

Start by figuring out where all your energy use goes, do a house energy audit. Use a gizmo that can measure the power used by each appliance. There's a gadget called Kill-A-Watt for about $20 that will read out the power use of the appliance you plug into it.  You may be shocked at some of your usage and seriously think about what needs upgrading, or simply ditching.

Cut back on fossil fuel usage

In many places, fossil free options are not easy to access yet. When you use, grid electricity, grid or bottled gas, wood and other energy sources like heating oil or propane all can have a "fossil fuel" footprint. Electricity is probably the easiest of the bunch to make an impact on as is your heating use.  There are commercial "off the shelf" and DIY options for power and or heating. Build a passive solar water heater or heat your home with passive solar heat, and you're well on your way to cutting back on the fossil fuels you need to use in your home. Passive solar can be a simple and cost effective solution.

Get into Alternative Energy

If you can't go off the grid, check out your local power utility, many utilities now offer green energy programs. Getting green power may be as easy as checking a box on your energy bill. About 600 of the US's 6,000 power utilities offer a green power option of one kind or another.  Sure, this may actually cost you a little more, usually around 10% extra.  This cost goes towards the utility investing in solar, wind, and other alternatives to coal, and they send you some of that green energy back. But - surprisingly, this is often a cheaper longterm solution to going off-grid, and has a huge green impact - the impact of a utility cutting back its footprint make a HUGE difference.

Baby steps to Self Generated Power

Going off-grid in most normal home is as we can see probably not the best solution.

But that doesnt mean that you cannot make a difference with small scale projects for home produced electricity.  With an investment of under $200 you can get started with solar power,  for a little more, you can take the equivelant of one room in your house off-grid, and for maybe $5-600, you can look at running a number of appliances around the house that once used to just add to your bill. That one-off cost is good for about 20 odd years of free electricity, all the time reducing your power costs and eco-impact.

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