Tag: dilbert

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

If you think we in the Green movement tend to take ourselves waaaay too seriously, here’s a bit of comic relief.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams describes with excruciating humor all the missteps in building a Green home.

I can relate. In my own Greener home adventures, we’ve discovered…

  • Solar panels without hinges cost A LOT of money to take down and put back up again when you need a new roof.
  • Tax credits are available for new roofs that keep your house cooler in the summer, even if you don’t use an air conditioner. But they don’t apply to roofs that keep you nice and toasty warm in the winter, even if you live in COLD New England.
  • Because of stress from extreme temperature variations, solar water tanks wear out in about half the time of conventional tanks—but not so fast that they’re still under warranty. Right about the time that the savings had paid for the unit.
  • Just because you want to go Green doesn’t mean it will be easy. When our furnace went, we couldn’t justify the cost of geothermal, and ended up replacing our oil-burning furnace with…another, more efficient, oil-burning furnace. Sigh!

    In an ideal world, we’d be able to afford, and justify, the $50,000 superinsulated roof, the geothermal heater, jacking up the R value on our 1743 farmhouse to the point where we had essentially no heating bill…but that’s not the world we live in. We did put in both solar hot water and photovoltaic systems years ago, but we’re a long way from feeling or being energy self-sufficient, and the capital costs were high.

    Am I sorry we took these expensive Green initiatives? Not at all. Do I feel we could have been better shoppers if we’d been more informed? You betcha.

    And do I want incentives to bring the prices down and the reliability up throughout society, especially for those least able to afford a large capital investment with a sometimes dubious payback? Absolutely.

    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail