The first thing I did when we bought our new house was install a BlueLine Power Cost Monitor. It’s a simple wireless device that reads the electric meter in realtime, calculates the total cost of the current load based on your local kW/hour price. Then it relays the data it to a tiny screen elsewhere in your house. It’s been running since we bought the house (we still haven’t moved in).

I’m establishing a baseline of power usage for the empty house before appliances, servers, televisions — anything that gets plugged in — gets added. I’ll have a good idea as we start adding our life to the house, how much power each item uses.

I have the biggest check I’ve ever written in my hands… At noon tomorrow we close on our new townhouse, and I’m a giddy first time home owner.

First project: install my ‘net enabled thermostat for remote HVAC control.

We just filled Duncan's Jetta's tank with 10 gallons of bio-diesel created from used restaurant deep-fryer oil by the Fry-O-Diesel test program. I was expecting more pomp and circumstance from the whole process... seeing this is the future and all. At the moment the future just looks like a pump connected to 55 gallon drums of delicious deep-fried fuel.

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We’ve just finished adding solar panels to our beach house in Delaware. Dale from CMI Electric did an excellent install that just took less than 3 days. Our beach house in the perfect location: south facing in an area of the country that gets heaps of direct sunshine. Click below to see the rest of the hardware.

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I won’t call myself green or an environmentalist (though we should all be) and I’m definitely not a tree-hugger, but we’ve got to get off the fossil-fuel-train. I have no doubt that a gallon of gas will hit $5. Nobody thought it would hit $3 so quickly and it did. It won’t be long before we’re paying $100 to fill a tank.

Since I’m a longtime city dweller, I haven’t owned a car for over 10 years. We take taxis, trains and borrow cars from family when we need one. For a year we have been thinking about getting a Mini Cooper, but the thought of paying $150 for gas a month is far from appealing. With a beach house in Delaware (2 hour drive) and a new house being built in Canada (8 hour drive), I’m going to be gobbling up the petrol.

Dunc’s diesel Jetta gets a whooping 45 miles to the gallon- which is fantastic. He’s now looking into fueling it with fryer-oil and bio-diesel. Added benefit: both can also run in his oil based home furnace.

I’ve begun researching hybrids as our first car. The Toyota Prius gets 60 mpg city and 51 mpg highway. An unmodified Prius can push 100mpg with the pulse and glide trick. Mods and hacks to allow plugging the Prius into the grid to charge at night and adding additional banks of batteries to the trunk have the ability to push the Prius closer to 200 miles/gallon.

$3000 in local and federal tax credits is also sweetening the deal. I just wish there as a sexier hybrid out there— and a hybrid diesel-electric running on bio-diesel would rock the party.

If anyone else is interested in weaning themselves away from the pumps, here’s some blogs I’ve been following:

• Hybridblog
• Greenhybrid
• Hybrid Scoop
• Treehugger