This year I decided to go solar at my house. The projections called for me to get the payback period within 15 years (and only 9 years if I manage to get all the tax rebates which is unlikely). I was not satisfied with a 15 year payback so I started thinking about ways I could cut that down to less than 5 years instead. Seemed to me there are 2 ways to do that :

1. Use electricity instead of fossil fuels (buy an electric car, install an efficient electric air-air heat pump instead of using propane to heat)
2. Sell some of the electricity I produce back to my tenants

I decided that the best course of action was to do both. Since I could not afford an electric car with the range I would need I purchased a 12,000 BTU Mitsubishi Air/Air heat exchanger from Sylvaine.com for $1599 shipped (available here). As a side not you need to get a line set with the heat pump which will add another $99-200 depending on the length. There are much cheaper Chinese units out (like 1/2 the price) there but my hope is that I’ll be able to get parts for it when it breaks and that it will last at least 10 years. I talked to lots of people with Mitsubishi heat pumps and they all love them. One thing that I really hate is this disposable society where people just throw things away rather than trying to fix them. I will do a separate article in the future on installing the heat pump and a review.

This article is mainly talking about the process of connecting the breaker boxes for my tenants together and turning them into sub-panels and setting it up so that their electricity usage is automatically tracked and they are billed every month using Eyedro energy monitors.

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