End of year and looking ahead...

We hope your Christmas was relaxing and meaningful.

We have continued to talk with our builder, Adam of Beyond Adobe. He believes in the same sustainability goals that we do and can produce the adobe/plaster aesthetic that we're looking for. He has lived here in the Verde Valley most of his life, I think, and thereby has a relationship with a prominent Sedona architectural firm. On occasion, he'll work out a special deal with these architects to give him some design services on the side - at rates significantly less than for the architect's regular clients. That appears to be what's going to happen on our project and we're pretty happy about it.

So, we're in the fun process of looking in books and magazines and websites for ideas and things we like that we can convey to the architects. We will, of course, dream up a much more expensive house than we can afford but that's what makes this the fun part of the process. The lousy part will be cutting back to fit the budget - sometime later.

Once we have a design, we'll have an important meeting with Adam about what we do first, second, third and who does what. We will reserve the right to do some of the building ourselves, although we'll try to stay out of his way on the main components. We will start the work with a little cash we have - phase 1. The next phase will have to wait until we sell either the house in Phoenix or the house in Rimrock (and figure out our living arrangements accordingly). We could consider getting a construction loan, too, but we're hoping not to.

We also met with a representative from the power company (APS) to try and get an estimate of cost to get power to our property - it's about 1500' away right now, although there is conduit in place that can be used to run new underground wires. Just a few days ago, we got word that APS estimates that pulling that wire and setting a new transformer will cost us about $15,000. So, armed with that information, we ran around the house today measuring how much power we use. It used to be that the refrigerator was one of the biggest power draws in the house. Our new refrigerator is very efficient, however, so we find that the TV and computer are among the biggest power draws. The biggest, however, are all the little things, combined, that are on all the time. Even when off, the Direct TV satellite box and the computer use about 100 watts combined. And various clocks, lights, and other small stuff, when they're on all the time, use a surprising amount of power. After we added it all up, we found that we could live comfortably in our new place on about 4 kilowatts (kW) of solar power. Although a solar power system that's not connected to the power company's grid - an off-grid system - is more expensive and includes batteries that are not particularly sustainable, we can still get significant rebates and tax credits for an off-grid system. For example, the 4kW system we would need could cost $25,000 if we do some of the installation ourselves but have an electrician certify it. We would expect to get an $8000 rebate from the power company (even when we don't connect to the grid), a $7500 Federal tax credit, and a $1000 state tax credit. After all that, we would pay only $8500 for the $25,000 power system - 66% off. The rebates are even larger for grid-tied systems. The same size system would cost a little less and the rebates would be a little bigger (tax credits are the same percentage). For a grid-tied system, we would pay only 15-20% of the initial cost. However, when the $15,000 APS cost is added in (no rebates or credits available), the cost of connecting to the grid is significantly higher than the off-grid option. So it looks like we will have an off-grid power system with a bank of batteries. The big question yet to be nailed down is what kind of cooling we will need. Part of our desire to use adobe is to minimize or eliminate the need for cooling - we'll see if we can make that a reality.

Happy New Year!