By Joseph N. DiStefano
Back when heating oil was approaching $5
a gallon, Theodore Frimet went shopping
for new ways to control heat in his
family’s modest home in a shady corner
of Croydon.
“I figured it was costing me $6,000 a
year, at last year’s prices,” he told me
as solar contractor Mark Bortman checked
the last roof panels and driller John
R. David checked the well grout.
“Plus around $800 for electric
air-conditioning.”
Frimet went green. That meant ripping
out bushes and smashing his concrete
driveway to dig and pipe a 500-foot well
in his front yard, to reach underground
water that stays a cave-like 56 degrees
Fahrenheit all year. And pumping
pressured fluid through that water into
geothermal heating and cooling
compressors to climate-control the |
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house.
Plus a rooftop solar hot-water system.
The cost: about $10,000 to David’s
employer, drillers B.L. Myers Bros.,
Glenmoore, Chester County; about $20,000
to Craig Geier’s GreeningTheHouse.com,
of Newtown, Bucks County, for the
heating and cooling installation, and
about $7,000 to Bortman’s Exact Solar
L.L.C., Yardley, for the roof and boiler
system.
Subtract 30 percent in federal
solar-energy tax credits and, as Bortman
told Frimet, he could make it back in
six or seven years.
“What made it appealing to me was
Obama’s stimulus,” which expanded
solar-income tax credits, Frimet said.
After the drilling but before the indoor
equipment arrived, Frimet lost his job
as a computer programmer. He tightened
his belt and kept the project running,
to avoid the frustration of having to
pay for oil while also repaying First
Federal Bank of Bucks County for half a
job.
Geier connected the system late last
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