May 8: Solar Gain in Victoria

We spent Thursday visiting three different places in Victoria. First we visited Solar Crest, a booming solar hot water system company. Solar hot water is my second favorite solar heating technique. It's currently the most viable alternative technology out there. The system that Solar Crest installs is inexpensive, there aren't many links in the energy transfer chain, it saves so much money since heating water and space is the biggest drain on your energy bill, there's only one moving part, each tube costs only $10 to replace, the broken tube material can be recycled, the energy source never doesn't need to be transported to your building, water is used as a battery instead of toxic materials, the environmental cost of producing the system can be offset withing 2 months of operation, paying for the system takes around 7 years and after 30 years of operation, the tubes are still heating water for free. The system gets put on your roof and hooked into your existing hot water tank. The way it's hooked up, you're never short of hot water and the system only uses the panels if it can get enough solar gain so you're not cooling the water.

We also visited Burnside Community Centre and got a tour of their LEED Gold building. Neat place and I love what they do for Victoria but almost the entire building was cement, which made all of us rather skeptical of the LEED system. Natural builders could pursue LEED certification and get it fairly easily but I don't know any of our buildings that have. It's an improvement on conventional building but sometimes the bigger picture gets disregarded. I'm glad it exists but it doesn't appeal to us all that much.

Last on our tour was Energy Alternatives who install mostly solar panels and wind turbines but do delve into other alternative technologies such as composting toilets.