Last week I saw a house a few blocks north of us with solar panels plastered all over the roof and after dropping Brandon & Maggie off at a park I decided to give the house a visit.  The first thing I noticed was the gutter water catching and storage system that the owner installed, 4 rain barrels installed in a complex system to fill every one and it was very impressive (I think that’s just for the front yard too).  One of the stickers on the door said that the house was powered by Bullfrog which uses 100% renewables and frankly I forgot all about those guys but will be looking into their services for my house now.

After I knocked on the door I was met by Des (who’s a pretty hardcore environmentalist woo) and I asked him if he had time to field a few questions about the solar energy system he has installed on his home.  LOL when he first opened the door I could see he was a bit apprehensive but after I told him I lived down the street he opened up rather quickly.  He told me the system he has installed is about 12-15 years old, that it cost ~$15k (don’t know how much that is in today’s dollars) and that he no longer pays for power…  During the winter he gets cheques from Hydro One in the range of $50 but in the summer the payments can be as high as $300!  Though even at that rate it’d still take quite a bit of time to make up for the initial cost, still I was surprised it was so high.

Anyway we must have chatted for a good half an hour about a whole array of topics but I had to cut it short because the family was waiting in the park for me, I got Des’ card though and he’s welcome to me calling him if I have further questions. 🙂

I get a lot of good sun at my house and really do want to be able to harness that free energy somehow, tie the system with a Tesla PowerWall and viola possible off the grid capability!  Not that I’m interested in that but it wouldn’t bother me to build some redundancy and frankly I believe that’s the future of power generation, micro generation in a decentralized manner.  Power plants are very expensive to build, maintain and to transfer power to the urban areas so if every building was generating its own electricity it’d greatly reduce the amount of energy we need from hydro, coal or nuclear sources.

Got to look into this more… 😀

Uh the rest of the day good, went to have Pho for lunch (seems like a tradition) and after Brandon’s swim class we went to pick up my mom to go to Estelle & Imran’s place to celebrate a belated mother’s day.  Frank & Megan joined us and it was great.  Estelle & Imran are what they call flexitarians, that means they’ll eat meat if it’s farmed in a sustainable manner and since they know what shops to shop at, we ate some yummy chicken wings & beef short ribs.  Brandon seemed a bit bored but played a lot with Frank & the cats Turtle & Pixel.

We stuck around chatting, talking about old times (like how I prefer the girls not help me clean) and it was fun times all around.  Thank you Estelle for arranging and we had a great time, haha best part was when I left and didn’t have to help clean up. 😉