Planning to fail…

OK.

BIG admission here….

We are going to buy new….

….Solar panels!

We have finally made the decision to ‘just do it’.

We have talking about it for ages. In fact, when we first started talking about it, we could have got them free, and after that we could still have got a really great feed-in tariff, but we procrastinated for too long…

Never mind.

I know we are not supposed to be buying anything new but we have some fairly solid reasons for doing it:

• Sustainability

I feel very strongly that as a society we really need to be embracing renewable energy sources.

The oil and gas WILL run out. And in the not too distant future. The supplies are NOT unlimited. And we WILL need alternative, renewable energy sources.

Surely solar, wind and tidal are the way forwards. Not fracking…

• Financial

We inherited some money last year which has been sat in our bank account earning about 1% or something depressing. We figured we may as well invest the money in something that will be saving us money, and earning more than the pitiful interest rate we are currently getting. AND we save money on our electricity bills. AND we get paid money by the electricity company! (If the sun ever decides to come out again..)

We could obviously have waited until the end of My Make Do and Mend Year, and then none of you would have been any the wiser. But it kind of defeats the point. We want to do this as part of whole ‘sustainable living’ journey, and so it kind of seems apt to do it as part of the year. And also, if we wait until September, we will have missed out on a whole summer’s worth of sunshine (here’s hoping for a sunnier summer in 2013!) and used more energy, with it’s corresponding carbon footprint.

And yes. I did ask the nice solar power man if it was possible to get secondhand solar panels. He just looked at me a bit strangely and said “ermm, no.”

So, as of the middle of February, we will be the proud owners of 16 brand spanking new solar panels.

Please don’t be cross…