Well, finally after months of research and quotes and installs, we have gotten there and our solar hot water and PV array is installed and operating.

The solar hot water disappointed me at first; the day it was installed was cloudy and raining and I was noticing on the Cent-a-Meter it was using the electric booster too often. That day, we used almost as much electricity as we normally do and I was wondering if I had made the right call installing it. The next day though, was sunny, and it didn't use the booster much at all, and as I had hoped, our energy consumption dropped dramatically (30% less power used than on the previous day).

So with the improvements we made from Cent-a-meter keeping us being motivated to be efficient and the solar hot water, we have more than halved our power use, down from an embarrassing 45kWh to 20kWh. Which is still high, but we still love our Plasma telly and we run air con and heating when we want to, in fact we have given up no luxuries at all, we have all the life style we had before, but it comes at half the cost to the planet.

To offset the remainder, we fired up the 3kW PV array today and on day 1 we generated 12kWh, putting back into the grid more than half of what we used, off setting us down to 8kWh of consumption today, and that sounds so much better than 45kWh! Happy days.

Now to drop another 8kWh and become 100% completely carbon neutral... We'll work on that...

On the ROI front, the PV array generated $6 of return today and the solar hot water saved us $2, so that's $8 back in my hand today; Sounds like stuff all, but that's a return of $3000/yr, which means we are on track for a 6yr ROI, meaning all this planet saving stuff we have done will have cost us $0 in 6 years.

So why wouldn't you do it?!