Moving at a Snails Pace.

Quite a few months ago I was looking at my electric bill frustrated by what I was seeing. In awe that my electric bill is the largest bill that I have. How can this be. I find it very hard to believe that since moving to our acreage here in South Dakota that my family has double their electricity usage. It is time to do something. otherwise i will give all my paycheck to the electric company. My first plan was to give the electric company a call and see if they can check and see if there is anything that might not be working causing these high electric bills. They did come out to my house and look things over. After a while of looking they said all looks good and that I should change out the one or two light bulbs (that have not been changed to LED bulbs) to LED bulbs. The gentleman that came by also gave one other piece of advice for lowering our electric bill. He suggested that I shut breakers off when not in use. I thought about this and struggled to figure out how that would help me make any significant reduction in my electric bill. I also thought that this would be very inconvenient with the way our house is always on the move. . I thought that I would try it on the outlets that I know I would not need and see if there is even a remote difference in power consumption. Well.... As you might of guessed I found no sign of saving anything on my electric bill. I guess it is time to start looking in other places for things to be more efficient. We have looked at changing our heating system but well it is propane so the electric usage is not that much. We have old appliances but they still work and the gain from a new one is minimal if anything. I am not sure what to try. I am about ready to give up.

Then one day while I was out driving around I seen a solar panel on one of those signs on the side of the road and I decided that I would look into solar power and see if it would be something that I could put to use to lower my electric bill. Fast-forward till a couple of weeks ago and nothing has happened except that my electric bill is still very high and I am more frustrated. Looking into solar seems to me to be a complicated process. I call different companies and they all give me different numbers for what I would need to do the job that I would want. So much different that it leaves me unsure if this is even an option. The next electric bill comes and it makes my decision I call up the company that has been working with me the best at trying to figure out if solar would work and we come up with a plan and I say go for it. A week or so later and a truck shows up at my driveway. He has on his truck four large pallets of things to complete a solar system. Supposedly everything I need. I unload the truck and move all the items to the garage and start to go through things. All here all checked in. Now what?

I start increasing my planning in how to set this up and I work to learn more so i do not have trouble when setting it up. It seems like a lot but at the same time it doesn't look to complicated I tell myself. I make my plans of when I can work on this project. because I do not have many extra days and there always seems to be things that need immediate attention. Well and all of my days off work in the last couple weeks have been during snow storms. So nothing is getting accomplished.

Well I am making new plans as they keep getting altered. I will get this figured out and installed. I can not wait till I can let the electric company know that they are not needed anymore. That would feel like quite an accomplishment. I will keep updating on the progress, if this works out and helps me get rid of most of my electric bill if not all. I know that I would be excited. Maybe It can help someone else decide we will see.