Quote:
Originally Posted by Xringer
But oddly, I have seen at least two where a giant fuel oil tank was buried.
One such tank buried in the front yard, looked like what you would find under the local gas station.
It was at least 20 feet long and 10 or 12 feet in diameter..
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I work for a local gasoline distributor and couldn't help but fix on this comment you made, so I looked up a tank in the neighborhood of the size you mentioned here just to get a feel for the capacity. A 120" diameter tank, 21' long would hold 12,000 gallons of fuel.
I hadn't read this thread until this morning. I noted from a comment by fellyB, a Yahoo reference where the typical 2009 annual electric bill was $2200, ~ $183 per month. Also from fellyB, if you clicked on the link "More Builders Building Net Zero Homes" two posts back, you find the 11,496 kWh for the average home energy consumption, or roughly 958 per month. {Thanks fellyB}
I'll turn 54 this month {funny, I don't feel that old
} and have been retirement planning for the last several years. No, not the traditional "jam all the money I can get into a mutual fund and hope some ponzi scheme doesn't rob me into the poor house." I have been trying to make my home net zero, to include producing enough electricity to run an EV. I figure with all the efficiency measures I'm taking, it's possible. The way I see it, I expect 6.8 kW of solar panels will produce about 875 kWh monthly on average. My home doesn't use nearly that much {last month 271 kWh}. If I estimate 500 kWh reserved for an EV, I'll have a bit more than 16 kW of energy to use on an average day. We plant a garden and get a modest amount of food from it, so that can't hurt either. As my mother says, the garden even gives me vitamin D by my absorbing some sunlight working in it.