1000 reasons to install a solar hot water system…
One of the best ways to reduce your household environmental impact is to replace your electric hot water system. Your hot water system can account for almost a third of your household greenhouse gas emissions. And its easy not to notice - it doesn’t have a noisy fan like a heater, or flashing lights like a sound system. It sits in a cupboard, or outside, silently burning away those kilowatts.
The best replacement is solar hot water. It doesn’t get much more efficient than using the heat of the sun to heat your water! And nowadays, there’s a host of different systems - storage tank on the roof, storage tank on the ground, frost-hardy, electric boosted, gas boosted. You name it, they’ve got it!
While they’re more expensive initially, its always the been the case that a solar hot water heater will pay for itself over time, due to your lower electricity bills. Recently, the Australian Federal Government introduced a $1000 rebate for replacing your old electric hot water heater with a solar version. Now that should reduce the payback time further still! 
You can get the rebate details by clicking here. Its also worthwhile checking with your local state government as they may offer their own rebates - details tend to change from year to year.
Categories: efficiency, environment, green, rebate, reduce, solar
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August 21st, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Actually, recent research suggests that the amount of energy used by a household in Australia is mainly in embodied energy from shopping - food and other items. The consumption atlas at http://www.acfonline.org.au/custom_atlas/index.html is quite an eye-opener.
So, while reducing household energy and water consumption is still a worthwhile goal, it’s not going to save the world (We love our Solahart hot water system, although it would be nice if Canberra had some sunny weather like in the old days.)
The atlas has Canberra creating on average 40.5% of its impact from food. And they seem to have done this in conjunction with a group at Sydney University, so it looks like it’s been researched fairly thoroughly. Definitely worth a look.
Keep up the good work!
August 21st, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Hmmm, and if I followed this blog closely, I would have seen that you’ve already mentioned the atlas…which doesn’t make it any less interesting, though.