I had lunch yesterday with a colleague who told me another way of green energy. It is PV cells and they are put on the roof of your house and are charged by the light, unlike solar panels which need actual sun.
We want to use renewable energy where we can. On the roof of our last house we had solar panels which provided us with enough hot water never to have to turn the immersion heater on.
This old farmhouse stands close to a cliff where the wind blows every day. Wind power for us is the obvious answer but people's perception of windmills are not good and it is, as people keep telling me an area of outstanding natural beauty, so we can forget that one.
My friend cheerfully told me that there was a capitol outlay involved but that they had recouped their original outlay in a couple of years.
This sounded promising so my better half looked into it. the wonder of google! The outlay would be somewhere in the region of £15 thousand pounds. it would take about ten years to recoup if we lived so long!
We havn't written it off...it could still happen...but a windmill would look so much prettier and there would be no need to surround the house with scaffolding. We have both had experience of ancient roofs in our past and are not anxious to send anyone aloft right now.
In the interim we go on using up the electricity and the oil and know we could do better!
If we were just a few years younger I think we'd just get on with it but theres the rub! Anno domini approaches.
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We would love to do something like that. However, we live in an urban village, in a Victorian Terrace House, which the local authority has in its wisdom made a Conservation Area.
So, change now needs planning permission and they are obstructive to anything that would change the look of our properties. Quite patronising in fact.
It was a good job that we had a porch built before they brought it in. Despite this, they tried to make us take it down. We won that round. When we asked planning permission to replace modern windows with Victorian Sash, they refused it. So we replaced wooden framed modern windows for UPVC frames. And as it was like-for-like, they could do nothing about it.
Now, we plan to move, so no more changes for the time being.
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