I did not, in fact, get an energy audit [0]. Yet. But it’s in the works.

In the interim – and in the interest of planning projects, which is much easier than actually doing them – we had a nice man from the local solar installer shop [1] come by and assess the solar potential of our little shack. The state-mandated rebates [2] for going solar in Colorado are pretty sweet right now – 50 to 60 percent off the total system cost – so no harm in seeing what’s possible, right?

The process was pretty painless – about an hour’s worth of some dude walking around the roof with a measuring tape and a solar pathfinder [3], trying to figure out where the sun hits and when.

As I’ve mentioned [3], our electric load for the year averages out to about 750 kilowatt hours [4] per month. That’s more than the Boulder average [5], but we’ve effectively got three units [5] living in the shade of one electric bill – us plus two apartments. Considering each of those apartments has a TV, a refrigerator, a computer or three, and lightbulbs galore, we’re not doing so bad.

To get to a hundred percent solar, we’d need about a 6 kW system [6] – equivalent to 31 panels lining our roof. That means 516 square feet of unshaded, south-facing roof space. The key word there is unshaded. We’ve got a decent amount of roof space, but we’ve also got a surfeit of trees. The trees are swell, of course – honey locusts and aspens and a snow crabapple or two.

Most of them sit on the south side of our house, where they offer some lovely summer shade, especially to our roof, which in the freaking crazy Boulder summer can get hot enough to fry an egg, hyperbole be damned. But sweet shade, unfortunately, means crap solar access. The cells [7] that compose a solar panel work in concert – if you shade a few, the whole panel cuts out. So even a stray branch here or there is a problem.

The solution, of course, would be to trim the trees – just at the top, to reduce the shade hitting our roof and increase solar access [8]. But I like trees. And the passive solar heating [9] they offer our house in winter. And reducing the shade means increasing the heat that hits our roof, which increases the heat that enters our attic, which increases the seriously brain-deadening heat of midsummer Boulder that seeps into our house. Maybe that’s a small price to pay for solar power – the big swinging hoo-ha of green cultural cachet these days.

Anyway. The solar guy’s banging out a CAD drawing [10] of our roof space with some potential panel layouts, and hopes to have an estimate back to me next week. I’ll keep you posted.