Today marks the fourth anniversary of us moving into our Lawrence Street home. As we reflect on those years, here are some thoughts.
NEIGHBORS
This is probably singularly the best part of living where we do. We have come to know, socialize with, care about and just enjoy the company of our neighbors. We have twice a year potlucks for the “extended” neighbors (about 25-30 attend), monthly “Thirsty Thursdays” for the closer neighbors (about 8-10 people), an occasional soda on our front porch or glass of wine on a neighbor’s front porch. All in all, it’s just wonderful.
WALKABILITY
Being close to downtown Eugene, we have a very walkable neighborhood. Just tonight, after dinner, Brenda and I walked a loop around the neighborhood, stopped at the corner market for our Haagen-Dazs bars (a summer ritual; we figure the walk cancels the calories). We often walk to close by restaurants for dinner, or downtown to get coffee and stop by the farmer’s market. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we sold our second car and now only have one car.
SUSTAINABILITY
If you have followed my blog, you’ll know we built our home to a very high sustainability standard. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a benchmark rating system for sustainability. Our home achieved the highest level: Platinum. In fact, for the first three years in our home, we actually produced more electricity than we consumed. And this is in an all-electric home.
But then Scarlett came along in February 2018. Elsewhere in this blog, I also discuss our commitment several years ago that our next car would be an electric vehicle. Just one year after moving in, we sold the second car, then prayed our 2001 Passat would last until we could buy an EV. That happened in February 2018 when we took delivery of our Tesla Model 3. Going bold and buying a red car (most of our previous cars had been some level of gray), we appropriately named her Scarlett.
We charge probably 99% of the time from home, with a 240v plug we wired into our garage. Our monthly fuel bill went from $62.50 to about $7.80 switching from gasoline to electricity. The caveat is we are now, after just over 16 months with an EV, no longer net zero. In four years, we have received from our utility 23,741 KWh of electricity while delivering to them 21,843 KWh. In four years, we have used a net of 1,898 KWh of electricity.
That kind of bummed me out a bit until a realized the average home uses between 800 and 1,200 KWh per month. Our monthly average is just over 39 KWh per month. INCLUDING our car fuel costs. So, OK, I feel better now. (Thanks, Eli for that perspective).
CONCLUSION
If we had all of this to do over, we’d do it. In a heartbeat. And we’d do it the same as we did.
We are so blessed and so happy in our ‘hood. Life is good.