As you know, going solar remains our goal. Solar energy is good for the earth, that is, clean, abundant, and efficient.

But if I need any other incentive for going solar, it would be the energy audit on my heating and air conditioning system.

According to our auditor, the average monthly kilowatt usage in our area approximately equals the square footage of the conditioned area. That means if my 1700 square foot home uses 1700-kilowatt hours per month, they think I am doing well.

That’s 55 kilowatt hours per day. The more conservative among the energy conscious say more than 20 kilowatt hours per day is wasteful. Maybe they don’t live in Texas.

In my part of the planet, south Texas, heating and air conditioning account for 50% of our energy bill. Although I use air conditioning more months of the year than heating, heating with electricity costs twice as much as cooling! Those dandy little heat-strips pull a lot of electricity!

The good news from our auditor is that our system is the right size for our home. I want to add a sunroom on the south side of the house to capture the lovely solar-thermal energy. Done correctly, we could heat a large portion of our living area with passive solar heat gain in winter.

The down side is that if I want to cool that space in the summer, I will need a larger air conditioning system.

Hmmm…there’s more to going solar than we think.

Heating water for your home accounts for roughly 25 percent of your home energy consumption. Since we are trying to reduce our home energy usage by 25 percent, we clearly need to do something about our hot water.

I will make a small confession here. I want a solar hot water heater. Here in South Texas solar thermal energy abounds even in winter! The Maker sends this lovely thermal energy to us on a regular basis and this mere mortal feels ungrateful not using it wisely!

OK. Tirade over.

My husband agrees using solar energy to heat our water makes sense. But he also wants to know that a solar water heater makes sense to our bank account. I do appreciate his frugality.

How much electric energy does our hot water heater use anyway? According to the energy guide on the side of the water heater, our tank uses 4992 kilowatt-hours per year. If this estimate is correct, we pay about $600 a year or $50 a month to heat our water.

Since we use our hot water only in the early morning and evening, my handy husband installed an Intermatic Mechanical Time Switch (T104R) on our water heater. First he tried The Little Gray Box but couldn’t get it to work. So he traded it for an Intermatic Mechanical Time Switch (T104R) , which he found easier to install.

The timer is set to turn the water heater on for three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. We will see if this makes a noticeable difference in our energy consumption.

Three hours of heating water to 120 degrees may be more than we need. If we don’t run out of hot water, we will adjust the timer to heat the water only two hours each morning and evening.

More later.