Allow me to introduce myself as this is my first post.  I am a physician at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, where I have worked for about 15 years.  My wife, Brenda, works at the Pat Jones YMCA.  We have five children who are all grown and out of the house.  We started doing foster care about 6 years ago, and plan to get more foster kids when the house is done.  Brenda and I are believers in Jesus the Son of God, and we are very passionate about our faith.  We enjoy life on the farm and we hope to use the farm experience to give foster kids a place to call their home while they are away from their own home.  Brenda and I enjoy our little 12 acre hobby farm and we plan to grow most of our own food.  We bought the property about 6 years ago and have been working on getting things set up little by little.  We have 10 acres of pasture and 2.5 acres of woods.  We are building a new house (almost done) and we have been living in the garage/workshop for about 18 months while the house is being built.  Our vision is to be semi-independent, as we have our own water (well) everything is electric (except the cars) and we hope to grow most of our own food through gardening, fruit trees and wild berries, and livestock.  We have 10 chickens, one bee hive and fish in the pond.  Someday we hope to have cows and pigs, as well.

Today I realized that we are using more electricity that I thought.  We got the solar panels installed by Straight Up Solar out of St. Louis last Monday and Tuesday.  Thursday Dwight from Southwest Electric Co-op came out and installed the electric meter for the solar panels.  When I got home on Thursday I flipped the big switch to turn the solar panels on, and nothing happened.  So, I turned it off again and went to bed, wondering why it wasn't working.  Friday morning as I was going out the door to go to work, I decided to give it another shot, so I flipped the switch on again and went to work.  When I got home I saw that the solar panels really were working, but it just doesn't show on the meter, as it only reads in Kwh (kilowatt hours).  It's a new style digital meter, not the old one with the little wheel that turns inside it.  Anyway, it was reading 30.  So during the day it produced 30 Kwh of electricity.  The other meter, the one that reads our usage from the grid, was reading 396.  The day before it was 394, so we had used 2 Kwh of electricity.  Well, as I was thinking about this today I realized that there is no way we could have used 2 Kwh of electricity in one day.  That's 60 Kwh per month, 720Kwh per year.  No way.  We normally use about 34 Kwh of electricity per day, on average.  What I think it happening, is that it is subtracting one to get the other.  That is, we used 32 and it took off the 30 we produced.  That is much more likely, as we are living in the garage while the house is under construction, and the air conditioning  is on full blast in both places right now, as well as lights, and water pump, and the electricity the construction crew uses every day.  Once the construction is done and we move into the house, we turn off the air in the workshop/garage and turn the temp up during the daytime, our electric usage should go way down.  I figure an easy way to test this would be to just turn the solar panels for one day and watch the result on the usage meter, as I really haven't paid that much attention to it before now.

The solar panels are designed to produce all the electricity we use during the year.  We are "grid-tied" so we don't have batteries.  If (when) the grid goes down we will use our gasoline-powered emergency generator to run essential things like heat, lights, refrigerator, and so on until it comes back on again.  I figure we use about 11,000Kwh per year, or about 34 per day, on average.  During the hottest time of year, in July and August, we will probably use all of that 34 for air conditioning.  When the weather is cooler we will produce about 30 and use only 2-3 per day.  We will then use more during cold weather (heat pump).  We have 30 240 watt panels on the garage roof producing a total of 7,200 watts of electricity.  Of course, that is the design max, it doesn't ever actually produce that much due to various inefficiencies in the system.  And, the sun doesn't shine from directly overhead all 14 hours of the day.  So, the most it will produce is about 6,500 watts at high noon (standard time) and less as the sun is farther away from its zenith.  The idea is to reduce our electric usage to match the production from the solar panels so we aren't buying electricity and we aren't producing any extra.  It doesn't pay to produce more than we need as solar electricity is expensive and coal is cheap (up front cost).  At a final cost to us of about $25,000, saving about $200 per month, it should pay off in 7-10 years.  With a life expectancy of about 25 years that gives us a benefit of about $35,000 during the life of the solar panels (that is, we should get about $35,000 worth of "free" electricity).

I will add photos of the installation and the meters on my next post.