Before retirement, we had done a lot of work on our previous house in Pennsylvania to reduce our greenhouse gas output. We had installed enough solar panels on our roof to produce almost all of our electricity usage. We purchased a Tesla, and expanded our solar array to produce the electricity needed to power it. We installed a wood-burning zero-clearance wood stove that reduced the amount of oil we used to heat the house during winter. The next step would have been to replace the oil furnace with a heat source that doesn’t use fossil fuel (probably a geothermal heat pump). But we retired and moved to California before that could happen.
Now we’re living in southern California, and we want to transform the house to being fossil-fuel-free. This will cost some money, but the task is pretty straightforward, fortunately. Heat in our new house is provided by a heat pump (which runs on electricity), so there’s no expensive furnace removal/replacement that needs to be done. The only appliances that used gas were the hot water heater, the dryer, and the range in the kitchen. We have already contracted to install a solar array that will produce all the electricity we need (and then some) in our back yard, though work on it has yet to proceed. We bought an electric dryer about a month ago. And just yesterday, we had an electric hot water heater installed to replace the gas water heater.
The old one was starting to act up. Over the past three weeks, I had to relight the pilot about a dozen times, sometimes several times a day. Further, with signs of rust on the exterior, it was clearly at the end of its useful life.
The model of electric water heater we bought is of a sort I didn't know existed. It is a “hybrid” between a traditional hot water heater with resistive elements as well as a heat pump. When there isn’t a rush to produce hot water, the heat pump will heat the water. If, on the other hand, the demand for hot water outstrips the ability of the heat pump to produce it, then the restive elements kick in to take up the slack. Note that the IRS is offering a $300 tax rebate for installing these, and San Diego Gas & Electric reduced the purchase cost by another $500. These units are significantly more expensive than other models, but will save on electrical usage in the long run. We’ve only had it for a day, but it seems to be working just fine, and there’s no pilot to light.
This leaves just the gas range to replace. That should happen in the next few weeks, and then we can ask SDG&E to shut off gas service. The real last piece of the puzzle is to get rid of my Honda FIT and replace it with an electric car—but we can’t afford that right now, and I’m using the car so little it hardly matters for the time being.
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