Amazing, it has been one year since we started the home improvement projects to endeavor to have less impact on the environment.  The progress has been good. A little slow but worth our while and it demonstrates that good things can be done with very little other than producing energy.

Energy – Our solar panel installation and turn up are imminent.  The real issue has been roofing, the right panel availability and some large scale design issues.  The system will be an 18 kilowatt design and should appropriately send back a lot of power to the grid in the day when prices are high and buy back at night. Unfortunately we don’t get the full benefit of the arbitrage due to the current regulations. The pay back cash on cash was within 7 years. Not bad.

Saving Energy — Now this one is the easiest, which my kids have pointed out a lot.  Turning up refrigerators a few degrees, Down thermostats, Turn of all lights when not needed, replace bulbs with CFL, but our Halogen replacement are still a little too expensive. Run pool or spa pumps at night only. Put smart power strips in on all electronics. And turn off the computers.  You can potential save 30-50% of your power bill

Portable Energy — Batteries are a household issue.  The rechargeable packs that we bought have two problems.  They are not smart and they don’t hold enough batteries.  I would love to see a new product design here that would really cure the issue. It is not hard. Maybe a new venture will come out of this thought!

Water – The well water is routable to the house now.  Amazingly only a nominal tap filter is needed to drink it for safety reasons. But otherwise we could go live.  We are thinking of separately pressurizing to become primary, but there are concerns from the city on this.

Waste Water — Still awaiting the regulations to change for grey water use in the house.

However, we do think that a very cool idea would be to trap the garbage disposal solid output to run into a composter or even a small Bio-digester.  At a minimum a simple trap filter could be harnessed that would greatly improve the speed and function of any compost solution.

Garbage — We are down to less then one trash can per week and the rest is recycled.

Electrical — We are now recycling all electrical products, cameras, phones, games, toys, etc through the office IT services. This should become a standard consumer offering.

Food — Our shopping is now almost all Organic at a minimum and we only get sustainable meats and fish. We buy very little processed food.  More importantly, we are putting in some larger scale vegetable gardens for seasonal food and are enhancing the few fruit trees we have(apple, orange, lemon, plum, persimmon)

This is all great progress for the year with not a lot of sweat.  It all seems so natural at this stage.  Just focus on what you want.