The house overall was very inefficient with extremely high utility bills. If we intended to use Solar by itself we would not have been able to get the clients bill to ‘0’ because the largest systems allowed for residential are 20kw which would create just over  CI$500.00 per month to be credited to that persons’ bill.

Therefore energy savings had to be incorporated. With a family of 4 children the washing and drying of clothes is constant! In the Cayman Islands a load of drying costs roughly CI$1.75. This family was doing two loads of washing per day, sometimes three!

We immediately convinced the client that installing a propane dryer and front loading washer (front loaders use less water and therefore reduce the water bill!) was the way forward. The difference in costs per month for washing and drying (including water saved) for this household went from CI$115.00 per month to CI$15.00

Cooking was also a huge cost for the family. Firstly they liked to cook, so twice, sometimes three times a day the electric stove and/or oven was being used. Once we changed out all cooking to propane the savings were substantial adding up to CI$150.00 pm.

Using a tanked hot water heater is perhaps the most inefficient way currently to heat your water! We immediately switched out the tanked hot water heater to a Geo Spring Water heater. Savings here were once again close to CI$100.00 per month.

We then switched our attention to the Pool Pump. The client was using a fixed speed 1.5 hp pool pump which was running 12 hours per day at a cost of CI$100 per month. We replaced the old pump with a SPECK pool pump (multi speed). The pump now runs at the lowest speed but for 24 hours per day and the savings are in the region of 80.00 per month.

LED lights! In general LED lights in The Cayman Islands pay for themselves in 9 months. We estimated that the client after a complete retrofit of lights would experience a drop of CI$40.00 per month after the retrofit.