New Blog

Hi All, whether you're just now seeing this blog for the first time or have been following it for a while, we obviously haven't been keeping it up to date, however, we've started a new blog that we'd love to have you come visit.  We'll try to keep it updated and it's more generic related to "Green" things.  Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy coming up with various articles.

Please visit www.SwayneyShadeofGreen.com

Thanks All!

Charging with Solar!

We are making power!  Progress Energy installed the net meter this past week and Southern Energy did the final check and turned on the breakers Friday afternoon.
Today (Saturday) I checked around noon and we were making 4.45 kW with a total of 12.5 kWh produced so far today!  So excited!  All 24 panels are showing online.

If the car wasn't charging right now I'd go take a picture of the meter feeding power to the grid...but right now the car charging is sucking up all our power generated, which that's ok because that's kind of like making your own gas for a combustion engine car  ;-)

Sad day.....

It was a sad day yesterday, even though we had some mechanical issues during the 7 1/2 months we had "lil red" we still enjoyed having it and will miss it, we had to turn it in yesterday and it was sad.
We were 40 miles shy of 10k miles, 9960 miles when we dropped it off.
So here are the final screen shots from the dash with the stats:
May be hard to see but in 9960 miles of driving, we used 54.4 gallons of gas, so about 183 miles per gallon.

The final stats screen, lifetime of 184 mpg down in the right hand corner. 

We look forward to adventures in the Electric world with the new volt, but we will still miss "lil red".

PV and EV, great combination!

When Southern Energy came out to take a reading of the solar panels we thought this might make for a great photo op of the PV panels, Thermal panels, two Chevrolet Volts plugged in, and their Southern Energy Prius.

Photo Op

I just thought this might make for a great photo op while moving the cars around.

Lil Blue

No your eyes are not playing tricks on you, that's a Blue Volt, it's Dawn's new 2013 Blue Volt!  We still have the red one for now...maybe a different story for another blog, but the blue one is awesome, sport wheels, leather, MY LINK!!!, a new safety package with lane departure and early crash warning systems, very cool.  Anyway, just wanted to post a quick pic, we have lots to do on the stats since they had to drive it all the way from Tennessee and used all gas, wow, 700 gas miles will be hard to get those lifetime stats back up, sounds like a challenge to me!

Oh no say it ain't so, we had to put gas in the volt so Dawn could go out of town!  I think this is only the 4th time we've put gas in it in the last 6 months with over 7300 miles of driving.  We went from April to June, and now from June to September, so about every 2 1/2 to 3 months.  In addition to only filling up every 2 to 3 months the tank is a max of 9 gallons, so it's usually around $25 to fill up.

On another note talking to a local dealer recently I've found out there are some nice lease incentives for the 2013 volts, you might want to check one out!