Solar Panels

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When we decided to drop city life and retire to a farm in the country, our objective was to attempt to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. This meant growing our own food, reducing our energy consumption and overall reducing our environmental impact.

We quickly noticed that things were not going quite as well when we were determined to operate our own Tea Room from a renovated barn. Our electricity consumption was literally going "through the roof". Stove, oven and fume hoods all took up power and to this were added a bank of refrigerators and freezers...not to mention electric heating during cold weather.

We alleviated part of the problem by installing a gas water heater, but this did not go very far in reducing our electrical energy consumption. So this week, it was time to accomplish another major project: the installation of solar panels.

Last week we took delivery of the panels and this week was dedicated to installation. For the work, we approached a local provider called Lantmark Solutions.

Solar panels delivered...time for installation

Our barn is ideally situated with an inclined roof line facing south. The idea was to install a system of just over 10 Kilowatts over the majority of this roof. Based on our sun exposure and historical data, we believe that we can generate up to 7 Kilowatts of electricity, thereby cutting our energy consumption by up to two third.

At first, we were actually considering a completely "off the grid" set-up. This turned out not to be possible with a more significant ground based installation not to mention a major battery storage facility. In fact, it is the latter that prevented us from doing this. The amount, weight, cost and lifetime of the batteries made it an economically unviable solution. As such we opted for a "net meetering" concept whereby we feed all the electricity into the grid (via HydroOne our local service provider) and we are credited for this power generation against our monthly consumption from the grid. With this set up in mind, we believe that the system will pay for itself within 3-5 years.

So daring the cold weather and what could have been a very slippery roof, the Lantmark team went about the installation. The first step was the installation of support rails.

Braving the weather to install solar panel support rails.

Then it was a matter of installing the panels. Not only did we cover the entire south facing roof line, but we also covered portions of the roof facing west and east (the barn is T-shaped).

Installation of western panels.

The final installation is actually quite impressive. Now we wait for hook up to the grid via HydroOne.

West side of solar panel installation (accommodating shaded areas)..

South side installation.

In the meantime, we continued to do our work on the Tea Room Spring menu. This included experimenting with vegetarian pizzas, as well as pastries.

Roasted vegetable pizza with crumbled goat cheese...ready for the oven.

One success this week was a coffee cream meringue. The girls devoured it in 5 minutes and are determined to make it a Tea Room staple.

Doesn't look like much, but this coffee cream meringue seems to be a real success.

Finally, we also continued work on our gallery listing. This week, one of our favourite addition to the collection is a small cabinet vase produced by Daum Nancy, circa 1900.

Daum Nancy acid etched and enameled "Bleuets" pattern cameo vase