Learning To Be Wasteful

What do you do when all of your assumptions are turned upside down. When white becomes black? When good becomes bad? When up becomes down? Thus it is in the de-I household. A bit of historical review will put things into perspective. 

A number of years ago Wife and I decided to finally go solar. I was looking back at all my posts and I somehow neglected to write about this which seems a bit weird. But we did. And when we were designing the system, Wife was insistent that we have put in enough panels to handle any major additions to our electric load such as moving from evaporative coolers to real air conditioning. 

One of the oddities of our local electric utility is that you are not actually allowed to use the electricity your solar system produces. Instead you put it into the overall grid. You get credits for this. During the times your system is not producing enough to meet your needs, you take from the grid. If your takes are greater than your gives, you pay the difference. If your gives are greater than your takes you build up a surplus that can offset negative production in the future. 

In our case, we never did get full A/C. Instead we got these incredibly efficient evaporative coolers that use about the same energy as a light bulb. So even in the highest heat of the summer, we are staying positive. This has meant that our surplus has kept growing and growing. 

There is no actual economic benefit to us to have this burgeoning surplus. So we've been forced to think, "How can we use more electricity." It leads to the bizarre think that I alluded to at the beginning. Turn off lights because you are using too much electricity? Nope. Let 'em burn. Need to dry clothes in the dryer extra long? No problem. Turn on that heat pump in the outside room and let it go. The fact is we are failing. We actually have a pretty efficient home. In fact we were buying a new refrigerator recently and Wife was looking for the most energy efficient. I objected. No, get the most energy guzzling one you can find. I'll be damned if I cam going to fund our local utility. And it is actually hard to change that 'saving' mentality. I still go around turning off lights!