We've been staying home mostly after all the excitement of Zion but we have been doing one thing that is pretty exciting: we are investigating adding solar power to our house. We live in the desert probably 25 miles from Death Valley. If you aren't going to use solar here, where the heck would you? So we've been talking with a couple companies about it.
To my surprise, there are limits to the amount you can install. I guess the local utility doesn't want to be paying everyone in the valley to generate power; they would rather sell power to us. Hmmm. Well, I guess they have to make money too. They do have a tremendous amount of infrastructure to support and I'm not really talking about our house being off the grid. Still, we are talking about $25-40K depending on whether we install it on the roof or in the back yard. At the end of the day I think we'll be going for roof mounted because there is nothing to stop our neighbors from planting a bunch of trees that would block the sun to a ground mounted array. (I know trees in the desert sounds dumb but there are lots of people with small forests on their property around us.)
I've been following the blog of a fellow who is thinking of living in a slide-in pickup camper. Now, I've got to say it would be better than nothing but, whew, I think I'm too old for that sort of thing. Of course, I'm married so it isn't like a single person doing it alone! Still, I don't think I could manage it just because of the size of the camper. We are happy traveling in our trailer but we have comfortable chairs, a sofa, a shower. I sure wish him all the luck in the world and I hope to read how happy he is in his new rig.
It's time to get moving. We donate to our local VFW's Food Bank and since Easter is coming up they have some extra needs. Time to go hit the grocery stores! Take care & keep being careful.
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