Boyung.com

So, yesterday was apparently Blog Action Day, where the goal was to get blogs all over to post on a single topic - the environment.  If I had heard about this before last night, and if I had had any time in the last three days, I would most definitely have participated, but since that isn't the case, I'm going to post a day late anyways.

I'm pretty big into environmental causes, so this idea actually really interests me.  Yes, I know, we conservatives are supposed to be the "anti-environment" people (at least if you ask those far-left liberals), but the natural things on Earth are very important to me.  I give money several times a year to numerous environmental organizations, and do many things regularly to help reduce waste in any way that I can.  Here's some of the organizations that I support, and I would love it if anyone out there does the same:

• National Wildlife Federation
• African Wildlife Foundation
• The Audubon Society
• World Wildlife Fund
• Wildlife Land Trust
• National Arbor Day Foundation
• The Nature Conservancy
• The Ocean Conservancy
• Defenders of Wildlife

We do all sorts of things around our house to help the environment, as well.  We pile up our yard waste until we can take it to the recycling center (to make mulch and compost) rather than burning them.  Grass clippings and most of the leaves in the fall get mulched and left on the lawn to renew the soil.  We've got more baby trees planted right now than we're going to know what to do with in a year or two and we've also got more plants inside our house than we know what to do with now.  We provide food, shelter, and water for wild animals in the area as well.  We also try to conserve energy as much as we can.  Yes, like any techie computer geek, I have lots of computers.  However, other than my energy-efficient server, they all are shut off most of the time, when not in use.  I know people that keep their computers on for months on end without ever shutting them down, and it just drives me crazy.  This summer, in the sweltering heat, we also just bought the first air conditioner that we've had for our house in the five years we've been here.  And even then, we just bought a single room air conditioner so we could sleep at night.  Our house is a nice lannonstone ranch, with new, energy efficient windows and we have lots of full grown trees as well, so that keeps the temperature down quite a bit most of the time, but there were a couple of weeks where inside the house it got over ninety degrees, and fans weren't really cutting it, so we finally broke down and bought one.

That all said, I still believe that we can do more.  I've been considering this for a long time now, and I think that this might be our next big house project - solar panels.  I love the idea of having solar panels to power all of our electric devices in the house.  For a long time, solar panels were not efficient enough for a residential building to make them worthwhile (especially in Wisconsin), and were also very cost prohibitive.  In my initial research, I've found out so far that we can probably power about 75-90% of our house, year-round, with a solar panel setup on our roof for less than $20,000.  Now, that may seem like a lot, but this will probably save us at least $150 a month in electric bills.  That means alone, the solar panels will pay for themselves in around ten years.  Also, if we sell the house, or anything along those lines, the panels will add to the value of the house as well.  In addition, Wisconsin has some pretty significant tax breaks if you install solar panels.  I'm not entirely sure if those are for businesses only or not, but either way, that would just be an added bonus in my mind.

With that said, the only question is, why haven't we done this yet?  I guess the answer to that is that we are still Americans, and we do love our excesses.  We obviously can't do big projects on the house every year, and we've already done two in our five years at the house.  Last year, we decided the more important project was getting part of our basement finished to put in a rec room.  Before that, we put in those aforementioned energy-efficient windows.  We still want to finish off the rest of the basement, and put up a new deck.  So now, we just need to work out a balance between those excesses and something that will benefit all of us (yes, all of us, including you) in the long run.  My altruistic self is hoping that the solar panels will win out, but I guess it will come down to which half of me is doing the convincing with the wife when the time comes.