Until a few weeks ago, our house was teeming with work crews from Simple Solar of Boulder, Colo., who were busy installing a rooftop photovoltaic system on our home. The dogs went nuts for hours every day, convinced there were giant woodpeckers on top of the house”and, it did kind of sound that way, but it was easy to put up with in the interest of going solar.

My husband works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and we’re both strongly committed to doing what we can to make our stay on this planet as green as we’re personally able to. About a decade ago, we switched our main heat source over to a pellet-burning stove that burns compressed, recycled wood pellets, and we’ve recently added a tankless water heater.

With the addition of the solar panels, we feel even more of a sense of being part of a greater solution, and I’m enjoying talking to curious neighbors and passers-by who want to know more about our system, and how it will impact our lives and the environment. We were especially lucky to be one of the first homes in the country to secure a networked micro-inverter, which allows us to track our energy production from the solar panels in real time (on a minute-to-minute basis), as well as our carbon offset, by logging on to a personal website. If you’d like to check out our sunlight collection and carbon offset for yourself, see it here.  Here’s to clean, abundant energy!

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