By Lisa Walthers. Lisa has been a Sungevity customer since 2013 and an employee since 2012.
Every morning in my chaotic scramble to get out the door, I unplug our car to head to work and hear my three-year-old son scream out the window, “Did the sun fill up our spaceship?”
I always considered myself somewhere on the spectrum of a green-mom meets realistic-mom. Working full time with two kids under three makes it increasingly challenging to live up to the standards I set out for myself prior to having children: “Of course we will ONLY eat organic and never watch TV.” I could slap my former self! That said, when my husband and I started looking for a new car to cart around our growing brood, we decided that we couldn’t continue to pay $4.50 per gallon to fuel our work commutes. We were determined to lease an electric vehicle – a Nissan Leaf that became known as the “spaceship” to my kids.
After making the switch to electric, we realized that swapping one fossil fuel (gasoline) for another (coal) wasn’t really achieving the feel good moment we had been looking for. It was also quite possibly going to cost as much for us to pay a higher electricity bill as it would have to pay for gas in our old car.
That’s when solar became the perfect synergy to meet my realistic-green mom mantra. Not only was our family going to save money by going solar (yes, a $0 down lease saved us money from day one!) but we could also use the moment to teach our kids that we no longer needed to rely on fossil fuels to power our lives.
It also means that in my rush get out the door, I get to turn around, smile and yell back, “Yes – the spaceship is powered with sunshine today!”
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