George Musser and his wife fell in love with a 140-year-old Victorian home in Glen Ridge and bought it. Fairly soon after they moved in, large heating bills started to arrive, raining on their romantic ideas about old homes and galvanizing the Mussers into action to trim down those expenses. A friend’s success in installing solar panels, and their own desire to conserve energy, inspired them to consider solar energy themselves.
They called in the experts; an energy auditor inspected their home in 2008 for air gaps, a move that’s key, Musser says, to insulating a home and driving down bills.
The result was “sobering,” says Musser. “I spent much of that winter caulking windows and weather stripping doors.”
As their conservation project progressed in small steps, Musser, who writes for the Scientific American and documents his family’s quest to go solar here, found that energy retrofitting an older home wasn’t going to be straightforward. Or cheap. He wrote recently that going the whole hog would require the removal of all the exterior siding and clapboard – possibly a $100K job.
Then, early in 2009, incentives for solar energy improved, allowing them to install solar panels in October, which were hooked up to the grid in December.
“The solar panels have been operational only since December, but the plan is to zero out our annual electric bill of about $1000. We paid about $5K out of pocket, after counting in government subsidies, so it’s roughly a five-year payback time. Arrays have gotten even cheaper since we ordered ours.” Musser said their home is noticeably warmer for their efforts and their heating bills have come down.
“There’s an improvement in the quality of life in the house. The upstairs used to be very hot, but now, it’s uniform throughout,” he said. “We put a new door in the back of the kitchen and eliminated draft, and low-wattage bulbs make the kitchen so much more livable – it used to be an oven before.”
Read Musser’s story on the conflict between old homes and energy conservation.
And tell us, have you had your home inspected by an energy auditor? Are you switching to renewable sources of energy? Have you installed solar panels or would you consider them?
(Thanks to George Musser for the photo, showing solar panels on his roof)
I havent read his blog, but were there any “Hurdles” involving the Glen Ridge Historical Society? Growin up in GR, we always had to contend with them, especially with our 150 year old Copper Roof
What these journalists won’t go through to get a story. I’m looking forward to the next installment: How I Killed a Deer With My Bare Hands and Fed the Raw Meat to My Family.
“after counting in government subsidies,”
The key phrase.
In liberal America you spend 100K to save 10K in the name of efficiency!
ok, after reading the blog, this sounds like a huge issue for older homes, albeit from the way older homes are built to “breathe”
In liberal America you spend 100K to save 10K in the name of efficiency!
And in conservative America, you pretend to be short-sighted in the name of partisanship!
Subsidizing these technologies now will have benefits later, to everyone. Heck, even China agrees.
ROC…just say no and call out the thugs of NO.
Worthwhile story but horrible photo! I see it credited to the homeowner/author who also supplied a much nicer photo for the for Scientific American site showing the front of his beautiful home. Sorry, but the artist in me still contends that aesthetics count even when trying to get a point across!
What could be more beautiful than the sight of a solar panel lessening the strain on our beloved planet?
George Musser should be lauded as a hero and immediately made Mayor of the Town of Glen Ridge, or perhaps even the Governor of New Jersey. If it were up to me, I would also grant him dictatorial powers. The climate crisis calls for quick, bold and decisive action. If we’ve learned anything from the debacle of Copenhagen it’s that global democracy is inadequate to the task of saving our planet from human greed. What we need are more people like Musser, willing to take charge and force change, even it if goes against the Will of the People. In the end, they will thank us–or at least their children’s grandchildren will.
I agree, the picture in the actual article is much nicer.
I live in the neighborhood, and I have two questions:
1: Why is the roof white? Every time I see this house out of the window I think there’s been a blizzard. I thought it was a tarp or something for the longest time (when I wasn’t busy thinking it was snow on a 50 degree day), but it’s definitely permanent.
2: How did they get the Historical people to allow this? They’ve given us such a hard time for every single change we’ve tried to make to our home–”if you can see it from the street” they have the right to shoot your project down–so how did they give approval for that white roof, and the solar panels that face the street? (They do face the street, don’t they?)
PS If this is the same family that changed the accent colors to blue and green, I wanted to compliment them because it looks so much better than it did.
brooksie: I discussed the white roof in my blog; see http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cool-roofs-are-finally-cool-2009-07-30 and posts referenced therein. The roof is very slightly pitched, so the color is not visible from the street, and the panels also face in the opposite direction.