Congratulations to Peter Amerongen on winning "Net-Zero Energy Home Champion of the Year" and to the team at Habitat Studio & Workshop Ltd on winning "Net-Zero Energy Home Product of the Year" for their PV Awning.  I believe this is the very awning that is on Conrads house.

Check out: http://netzeroenergyhome.ca/2011-award-winners

My house uses natural gas for space heat and domestic hot water. When analyzing the benefit of my solar collectors, the obvious thing to do is to examine the actual change in my gas consumption. To answer this, I've plotted the amount of gas I burned per heating degree day (HDD) per month. Using HDDs adjusts for the variability of the weather and allows an apples-to-apples comparison between different years.

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It looks like a good time to own a net-zero energy home.  Not only are the days getting longer but electricity rates have just increased by 66% . . .

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=05a64a7d-9b08-4ed1-9883-b2392f510015

. . . and the forcast is for high power rates continuing into the future:

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/business/story.html?id=e14dd103-ef6d-4ccb-9534-3a7e7ca58203

I thought I'd share some graphs showing the output of my solar collectors and the results of my recent renovations (collector installation included) on my home energy use.  Here is the heat collected (measured in kwh) plotted with the maximum daytime temperature:  read more... »