A friend at work mentioned a few days ago that he was interested in getting some solar panels.  He’s already taken a few steps to make his family more self-sufficient and less reliant on public utilities, and this is the next step.

I began to wonder what kind of money solar panels were going for.  So I hit up my trusty source: eBay.

I did a search for “solar panels” and checked the completed listings for items that sold.  I sorted from highest total price (final bid price plus shipping) to lowest.  Here’s what sold on the first 400 listings last night:

This is a very rough calculation, of course. I took new and used, monocrystalline and polycrystalline, with and without extra stuff, with cracks and without, all different brands, and just took the total cost and divided it by the total wattage to get the cost per watt. The average of the 84 auctions: $3.59 per watt.

How fast do solar panels pay for themselves? To figure this out we need to know how much electricity would cost elsewhere.  For us, it’s 9 cents per kilowatt-hour.  Let’s say that my power needs are 1 kw, 12 hours per day.  One kilowatt of solar panels will cost me $3,590, plus installation, which I have no clue, but let’s say that it brings up the cost to $5,000.  So, there I go, I’ve paid for my power needs.

If I pay 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, that’s $1.08 per 12 hours (day).  Diving this into $5,000 gives me a payback time between 12 and 13 years.  It’s a pretty expensive alternative at those prices.  Plus, I’m not even looking at power losses, cloudy days, tree shade, aging of the panels, etc.  It’s likely a better deal for people in sunnier states (and higher metered energy prices).

But on the other side of the equation, will power prices go up?  Will it be rationed?  Will it even be available?  This gets back to my friend’s original motivation:  self-sufficiency.  In any case, this is something to keep on the radar.

My analysis might use a little fine-tuning.  Any other things that are important to consider?

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

A couple of weeks ago our electric water heater began leaking out the bottom.  I had an older copy of Black & Decker Complete Home Repair and it told me a couple of things.  First, there was no repairing mine; it needed to be replaced.  Second, it appeared that I could do it myself, or at least try.

We bought a unit and tried to put it in ourselves, but we ended up hiring someone to help us with it.  The folks who installed it answered a lot of questions we asked, and shared a bunch of tips.  Here’s what we learned from the experience:

1. Know when you don’t know. I found out that I didn’t really know enough to install it myself about half-way through the installation.  There is no shame in paying for competent help, because it will likely cost less in the long run.  We were glad we hired someone to help us.  I would have made a number of mistakes.
2. Don’t lay the water heater on its side when you take it home. It will probably say this on the box, but believe it!  Lowe’s said that they had gotten a lot of returns because one good bump while the water heater is on its side will ruin it.  It’s not designed to be sturdy on its side.  We were able to get away with it leaning a bit — actually, a lot — inside of our minivan, but I still had to drive carefully and take it out carefully when we got home.
3. If you buy plastic piping for the water leads, make sure it’s rated for hot water. Polyethylene (PE), acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) piping are not rated for hot water.  Chlorinated PVC (CPVC) is.
4. Get an aluminum pan 2″ wider than the base of the water heater and put the water heater in the pan. Install the drain pipe so that it goes from the pan right to the drain.  Twenty years down the road when it starts to go again, a slow-ish leak won’t flood your house.  It will just fill up the pan and go down the drain.
5. Drain the water out of the tank if at all possible, but try this if you can’t. A full 50-gallon tank weighs over a quarter ton.  We could only drain about 5 to 10 gallons out of ours before the water just stopped coming out.  (It was either a corroded drain valve, or too much sediment, or both.)  We had to get it out of the way down a couple of stairs.  Here’s the trick we used.  We had some wooden ramps saved from when we bought our lawn mower and needed to load it on to a truck to bring it home.  The ramps were constructed with a ramp kit like this and two long wooden boards.  We had enough room to rest the ramps on the top stair, down into our garage.  From there, we lifted one side of the (full, old) water heater and rolled it over to the ramps (by rolling I meant spun it on its base; it was mostly upright).  We were able to roll it onto the top of the ramps, and down the ramps into the garage.  From there it could be taken outside and tipped over when the water was cool enough.  If you feel the slightest bit edgy about moving these heavy objects around, get help.  It’s not worth permanently injuring yourself to be a hero. Seriously!
6. Know where the house water inlet valve is before you touch anything. Best to have the water pressure off if something breaks!  (Oh, and shut off the circuit breaker, too.  Test leads with a voltmeter to be sure it’s off.)
7. If you install new water inlet (outlet) leads, make sure that the water is always flowing down (up).  In other words, make sure the lead length isn’t so long that you have to run the inlet pipe back up before you attach it to the water heater.  If it’s too long, there is a reverse trapping effect.
8. Use Teflon® paste. Teflon tape will probably seal the threads on the inlet and outlet but paste will work better.
9. Once things are installed, fill the tank before turning on power to the unit. If the tank filaments fire before they’re surrounded by water, they’ll burn out very quickly and very messily.  The water cools them so that they don’t burn out.
10. After things are installed, occasionally exercise the water inlet valve, and the hot water outlet valve, but not the emergency pressure release valve. If the inlet and outlet valves are left to sit, the internal seals can corrode.  (My old inlet valve had corroded to the point where I couldn’t completely shut it off.)  However, don’t exercise the pressure release valve.  If a small piece of something were to get into that valve, it might not close completely, which would create a slow leak.
11. Remove sediment regularly. The people who installed ours said that once a month is what should be done, but that “no one really does that.”  Not removing sediment from the bottom causes the tank to corrode faster.  It’s probably what killed ours.
12. Oh, and don’t scald yourself. The people who installed ours could not set the temperature higher than 120 degrees Fahrenheit.  It’s the law in Virginia.  This is plenty hot enough, and it’s cheaper than keeping it at 125 or 130 degrees.

This is what we learned, and you may use them if you want, but they are no substitute for detailed knowledge, common sense, and professional help, if needed.  I give them freely, but I also assume no liability if you use them. They’re based on my very limited experience and on me talking with the guys installing my water heater for a few hours.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Having said that, if you can do the installation yourself and do it correctly, you stand to save several hundred dollars.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

There is a silver lining to the recession:  gas is about half as expensive as it was just a year ago.  (It’s just north of $2 per gallon around here.)

It didn’t seem to get high enough for people to change their driving habits drastically — people were still sitting in the parking lot idling when it was over $3 per gallon — but it did get our attention.

A few days ago I drove to work with the window down to cool off the car instead of turning on the AC.  As I drove past the gas stations it got me thinking:  This recession is probably going to be the last hurrah for cheap gas. Oil prices, and gas prices, have nowhere to go but up:

• We’ll have a recovery (eventually). This will be a long, and hard, recession, but we’ll get out of it.  Once demand for “stuff” picks up again, we’ll need energy (oil) to get that stuff from one place to another.  That will drive its price up.
• We’ll have rising prices due to inflation. (Rising prices and inflation are not the same thing.)  All of that money that’s flooded into the banks over the past nine months will eventually be lent.  More dollars chasing the same amount of goods means prices rise.
• We’ll have rising prices due to dwindling supply. It’s not quite true that we’ll have more dollars chasing the same amount of goods.  They’ll be chasing fewer goods, specifically oil.  In the long run, $4 gas will appear cheap.  $2 gas will have been ridiculously cheap.

Continue to minimize your gas expenses. There’s likely not much that can be done to slow the eventual end of plentiful oil, as one person conserving enables another to guzzle.  The best that can be hoped for is to minimize your expenses to improve your bottom line.  Heck, pretend gas is $15 and sock away the $13/gallon.

Or roll down the window on a beautiful day instead of turning your car into a meat locker with the AC.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

(Fair warning: rant ahead! Check out some really cute puppies or join MyPoints if rants aren’t your thing.)

I think I knew that Earth Day was coming up but the real reminder came when I checked Google today. They changed their logo’s primary colors to a happy, huggy lush waterfall scene with a shiny, happy turtle — one that was no doubt protected to the fullest extent of federal law. Today was our yearly reminder how horrible we are to the environment as a species, and how much closer we’ve come to cooking, poisoning, and asphyxiating ourselves on this planet.

I’m firmly convinced that we won’t do nearly enough to save this planet unless we have absolutely no other choice, either by the government saying “NO!” loudly enough to get our attention, or by things getting so hot, dry, and polluted that we taste the consequences of our actions every day. Because being green is inconvenient and expensive, and we like things easy and cheap. If given a choice, I’m not likely to buy a more environmentally-friendly product unless it saves me money. A lot of people don’t really have the choice.

We like electricity that just works as opposed to electricity that depends on energy from solar panels fed into batteries that we have to maintain. We like gasoline engines powerful enough to pass that grandmother in the left lane. We like our coffee available 24-7 in a Styrofoam cup so that we don’t have to go to the trouble of brewing it ourselves.

Oil prices are going up. Gas prices are going up. This says loud and clear that more oil is demanded than is supplied. We’re not conserving oil overall. We’re using it up as fast as we can. This behavior says that three and a half bucks is nothing. If we were really serious about conserving oil, there would be a $10 per gallon tax on gasoline. Heavily taxing the oil companies like Russia does isn’t the way to do it, because it’s not the source of the problem. People buying “doolies” and SUVs for their commute are where the rubber meets the road, as it were.

But what do we do instead? Let’s remove the federal gas tax for the peak driving season! Make it cheaper so we can keep driving as we have been! And let’s probe and pester the oil companies because they made the misstep of investing decades of exploration and beaucoup bucks bringing all of this oil to the economy, and how dare those rotten scoundrels make so much freaking money at the expense of struggling Americans. That’s entirely the wrong answer. The only way to reduce the impact is to use less! We’ll get to $10/gallon one way or the other, but the slow road up will do the most damage.

As it is now, most green purchases people make are to save their own money. (I’m all for saving money! Sign me up!) I use CF light bulbs because they last longer and draw less current than incandescents — money savings for me. I buy a fuel-efficient vehicle because the gas costs me less to get from point A to point B. I recycle with our county’s landfill only because I can dump my non-recyclable stuff for free. Otherwise I’d be looking for someone to buy my plastic, glass, and metal. If “good for the environment” is all a product has going for it, that doesn’t sell on a large scale. “Saves you money” does, and if it happens to be green, well then great, you get a little green star on your forehead.

The same goes for businesses. It’s all to pad their bottom line, or grudgingly taken away from it because they’ll suffer more for not complying. Green to IKEA is charging for plastic bags so it doesn’t have to pay for them. “Going paperless” is more about cutting the business’ costs and shifting them to us. Catalytic converters make cars more expensive and decrease gas mileage, but new cars have to have them. Any company that sells green to people — whether it’s organic, renewable, or recycled — is done only because there’s a buck to be made. There’s big money in catalytic converters, wind turbines, solar panels, fuel cells, free-range chicken, and organic oatmeal. They’re not doing this out of love for the giant panda. (Did you know that they’re actually really violent animals?) Good feelings don’t put food on the table. Moving product does.

Oh, and people living off the land with a neutral carbon footprint out in the middle of nowhere? Many of them probably just want to be the heck away from the cities in the event of a bio-attack. There’s safety in isolation. Or they see today’s debt-driven, oil-driven lifestyle for what it is — wholly unsustainable, and getting more expensive every day — and they want to learn how to live otherwise before they’re forced to. It’s less about the environment and more about their survival.

Before you get me all wrong (!) I’m not a hyperconsumer. I buy used things, I have a fuel-efficient vehicle, and I separate out my papers to recycle even though I really don’t have to. I just don’t see Earth Day as having much impact beyond being a yearly reminder: “Oh yeah, taking care of the planet is a good thing to do.” Until humans, and the households, businesses, and countries that they run, put surviving on this planet ahead of their self-interests, the locomotive is just going to accelerate toward the cliff. The problem is that we’re beyond the point of it not hurting, and the less it hurts now, the more it will hurt later. Unpopular decisions will have to be made, and I just don’t see that happening until we’re all up against a wall.

What can we do? I guess a whole lot of incremental changes add up to a big change, but even the biggest change is too little too late now. The best thing to do is prepare. Prepare for $10 gas, then prepare for $20 gas. Prepare for hotter temperatures and less convenience. Prepare for not taking a long hot shower every day. Prepare by learning useful skills, like canning, sewing, gardening, hunting. Prepare to cooperate as opposed to getting ahead.

And prepare to save. Get some CF light bulbs.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

A couple of weeks ago we went to IKEA to pick up some light bulbs for some of our lamps. I was a little surprised to find out that IKEA had started charging a nickel apiece for plastic bags. We don’t go to IKEA often, and the bag charge had been around for a couple of months in the US at that point, and for almost a year across the pond. IKEA also dropped the price on its gigundous heavy-duty reusable happy blue shopping pouch by 40% to 59 cents.

This move is good for the environment. But what you probably won’t hear through all of the sunshine-blowing is that this move is also quite good for IKEA:

• Plastic bags cost about a penny to make. Selling them for a nickel means a 400% markup, which is huge in retail. Even with the $1.75 million maximum they’ll be contributing to American Forests this year (the proceeds for up to 35 million disposable bags), the tax write-off will just about pay for the bags.
• There’s no word that the contributions will continue next year though that’s not set in stone. After the 12 months are up all of the proceeds stay at IKEA.
• The customers buying and using the reusable bags are paying for the privilege of advertising for IKEA.

(I’m not capitalizing IKEA for any particular emphasis; that’s how the company’s name is spelled.)

Words from Pernille Spiers-Lopez, president, IKEA North America:

We realize that our ‘Bag the Plastic Bag Program’ is a small step. But we know our customers want to help and support the sustainability of our planet – for today – and for the future of our children. IKEA believes home is the most important place in the world. And what more important home is there than our planet? This program lets our customers know we have our stake in the ground and are committed to continuing to be an environmentally responsible company. IKEA has always been a home furnishings retailer for the many people. This program reaches out to everyone and embraces the idea that together we can do a lot!”

This is a great example of sunshine-blowing: First, regardless of whether or not I want to support the sustainability of the planet, how can you assume that I do? Second, it’s certainly a compelling choice to promote the “together we can do a lot” mantra when the customers are footing the bill. Third, why such a “small step?” If the goal really is to reduce the number of bags, the fastest way to do that is cancel all corporate orders for them and sell off the checkout-lane plastic bag holders in the as-is section. That would reduce the number of plastic bags put into the environment by IKEA by 100%! Done! But this combination of expense reduction, profit seeking, and public relations coup has less of a positive environmental impact than it could. It sounds more like: “Helping the environment is good, but if you don’t want to, that’s all right! We’ll gladly take more of your money.”

Now before I tag myself as an enviro-hater, I do recycle most of what I can and refrain from taking more bags than I really need. I also re-use the plastic bags I get in a number of ways. (Hey, it’s good for my bottom line!) A much more effective way to get customers to cooperate is to reward them for not using the bags. I’ll bring bags back to Ukrop’s and re-use them to get 3 cents off per bag. That’s something I can get into: share the savings with me! Again, it’s good for my bottom line. Being green means getting green.

Or just don’t offer me bags in the first place: Costco has a huge bin of product packing boxes that work fine. I’d rather have a clear picture why a company does what it does — which is to make more money — than to have to figure it out. Costco didn’t do plastic bags because they cost money. That’s how they cut costs, and that’s how they pass the savings onto the members. I’m with them on that one.

IKEA’s goal is to make money too, but covering it with several layers of warm fuzzies as my hand is being forced rubs me the wrong way. If they had instead asked me to not use a bag, I probably wouldn’t have used one!

After work today I took probably my last opportunity in a while to buy gas under $3 per gallon.  Gas yesterday was $2.96/gallon at the three gas stations near where I work.  The three stations are usually the same prices, and almost always within a few cents of one another.  When I left work today, the one closest to my office had gone up to $3.10/gallon, but the next one down the road was still at $2.96.  I was only slightly below half a tank but I gassed up anyway.  A fourteen-cent-per-gallon differential doesn’t last for long.  Either the first station jumped the gun or the other station hadn’t updated their up.

The last time that gas was above $3/gallon around here was during Hurricane Katrina when the supply line was disrupted.  Where’s the emergency now?  Or is it just the beginning of a long one?  As much as some people want lawmakers to Do Something About It, this long-term trend is beyond any government’s power to stop.

As much as we love our Town and Country, the thought occurred to me that we could use a more efficient vehicle to replace that one.  The van gets in the low 20s.  My Corolla gets in the mid to high 30s.  This is not going to be an easy sell to my honey, who loves it even more than I do.  It’s not to the point where we have to cut gas expenses, but I’m going to aim for having our next vehicle be at least 30 mpg.  It’s on my mind.  (Of course, prices for used SUVs might go way down if gas hits $4/gallon — but that’s not the green solution.) 

So, with expensive gas getting entrenched in our lives, how are you handling it?

Dus10 of Financial Freedom 4 All commented on my desire to plug up the little electrical leaks in my house.

He warned that I might be disappointed with the amount I saved shutting off lights and unplugging appliances, and instead suggested that I watch the big ones, like central air and clothes dryer, since they use a lot more energy.

Well, enter the Internet to save the day:

Internet-connected appliances coule lower energy bills

This is pretty cool — a pilot program in the Pacific Northwest called the GridWise Initiative that does real-time pricing and load adjustment to help consumers save on their energy bills and also lower the possibility of a debilitating blackout.  Internet appliances, like clothes dryers, can be set to operate only when the cost per kwh is below a user-defined threshold.  The dryer checks every few minutes to see if this condition occurs.  It’s wild!

With Memorial Day around the corner and gas hovering around $3/gallon, the cost of getting around is on a lot of people’s minds. It’s on mine, for sure.

Last time I gassed up I was pleasantly surprised to see that my Oldsmobile Achieva got over 31 MPG — over the past few months it had been doing about 3-5 MPG less. Some of the things I knew I had been trying to do to boost the mileage:

• Clean out the car. Not necessarily detail the car, but get rid of junk. The heavier the car, the harder the engine has to work to keep you moving at a given speed. My car had gotten pretty cluttered and I cleaned out the trunk and the back seat this past month.
• Watch the AC. It’s getting warm in VA, but by cracking the windows I can survive.
• Take it easy on the acceleration and braking. I get passed a lot because I tend to accelerate pretty slowly. Also, coasting to a stop will save a little gas over stepping hard on the brakes.

These tricks help with the amount of gas usage assuming that you drive the same number of miles. These tricks helped me a little, but it’s only a part of a gallon a week in savings.

If you don’t drive the miles at all, that’s the best savings of all. I admit that I’ve been pretty poor at looking for carpools, but after reading The Long Emergency I’m a lot more motivated to get used to the idea of carpooling. With a little adjustment to my schedule my neighbor and I (yes, my neighbor and I work at the same place — in the same building, even!) could save about $5/week in gas just on our commutes. And our commute isn’t that long (12 miles one way). If your commute is 40 miles or more, then it’s even more advantageous. Or if you can carpool three or more, even more savings.

The DC Metro area’s CommuterPage.com has ten tips for successful carpooling. There are also sites like CarpoolConnect.com that let you look up possible matches by zip code.

Probably the best way to go about it, though, is to ask your co-workers and set up ride-sharing informally.

You may have heard of this trick before. You can save energy on the operation of your freezer (or refrigerator) if it’s only partly filled by freezing (or cooling) bottles of water.  It takes energy initially to get the water down to temperature, but once it’s down there, it will hold its temperature a lot better than air.  Water is about 800 times denser than a comparable volume of air, and water has a specific heat about four times that of air.  So, you’re looking at over 3000 times the heat necessary to heat up a bottle of water than to heat up the same volume of air.

Essentially, the cold or frozen water is like “cold ballast” that really resists changes in temperature, especially when you open the door.

A side benefit is that you can reuse (rather than throw away or even recycle) a few plastic bottles, giving them a little bit more of a useful life.

No, I’m not talking about people eating a lot of beans.

I’ve tried not to be wasteful with gasoline, but after reading The Long Emergency I’ve been very acutely aware of oil-related everything. Plastic bottles, asphalt, CD cases — and especially gasoline.

Gas actually ticked down a few cents this week, but it’s still closer to $3 than $2. I think we’ve bid farewell to $2 gas.

Anyway, a few things that made me think today:

• I’ve seen four trucks with “For Sale” signs just along the routes I take to work. A lot of these probably have $80 fill-ups now.
• As I was leaving work today, there was a big truck next to me. Right before the light turned green, I heard the engine start up. He had shut off the engine at the stop light. This light isn’t particularly long. I had thought that you needed to have a substantial wait for the engine shut-off to be worth it, but apparently 10 seconds is long enough.
• I stopped at the Sheetz after work. As I went in, the person in the space next to mine came out to her car. The engine was idling the whole time. Some people get it, and some people don’t.

Any other events you’ve seen that give you the impression that gas prices are on people’s minds?