I'm not saying you're doing this, since obviously you can't go without your solar panels, but the now that more and more solar panels are getting installed on houses, there's now the perverse effect where people end up installing power hungry stuff like air conditioners into their houses, or even start to heat their houses again with electrical heaters, just because "the power is there anyway". Sounds like big NO to me, but that's just me.

Also, the creation of a solar panel blows more CO2 into the air than that panel can ever lower through its entire life cycle. For this reason I'm not that big on solar panels, which all seem to be a partially government funded (well, in Belgium they are anyway) scam to me. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the government, who offers funds for the installation of solar panels now, would start to tax them in a few years, effectively reclaiming all the funds they have granted in the first place and then some. And also what to do with all those 'used up' solar panels in 20 years from now? How to recycle those? As far as I know, nothing has ever been said about that.

When we built our house, I paid special attention into lowering energy consumption as much as possible. Not only for the environment, but also -I'll be honest here- the less energy you use, the less you pay. I reached my goal more or less with several things, but one thing in particular: insulation. I put as much of the stuff as I could inside the walls, floor and roof. I also heat up the house and my hot tapwater with a geothermal heat pump (which works excellently!). A normal power use for our house, which has about 320m² of usable space, is about 1000 KWh/month. I'm really pleased with that since the power company themselves claim that normal monthly use is about 3.500 KWh - 4.000 KWh. I probably could still improve this by using some of the Mark's tips here, and I will.