Summer 2009                                                                                                                  Volume 3, Number 3

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

 

 

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

 

 

month. The family’s been using the A.C. during this unusually pleasant July. “It’s comfortable. It’s whisper-quiet. And there’s less dust,” Frimet told me. “My big challenge right now is keeping my wife and my mother-in-law happy.”

 

“Mom’s always cold,” said Janet Frimet.

 

“And I’m putting the lawn back together,” Ted said. “I’m a bush-and-tree guy.” Green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Law of Concentration

 

So the kids are back in school and I am helping with math homework that I haven’t seen in 35 years.  They would rather see who is going home on “Big Brother” than sit with Dad and learn about multiplying fractions.

 

Anyway, so the kids are back in school…sorry, I suffer the same ailment at times. Concentrating on anything today is a job unto itself. We are all balancing concerns about the job, the bills, healthcare, what to do with the family that doesn’t cost that much and what food gets recalled this week? Who really has the time or energy to focus on the job at hand and forget the pressures of every day life for 8-12 hours daily?

 

The Law of Concentration states that “whatever you concentrate on, and think about repeatedly, becomes more of a part of your inner life, and consequently your outer life.” Kind of like “if you build it he will come.”  Maybe a better example is this; if you focus on being successful every day, it becomes something you value and ultimately something you achieve.

 

There are dozens of connections concerning safety and focusing on safe habits…enough for several newsletters. But let’s look at this a little different. No one wants to constantly hear “wear your safety glasses,” or “don’t bend your back while lifting.”  After 20 years in this field, I am kind or tired of saying it myself. So I am going to stop.

 

If you read the law from the end forward, events occurring 

 

 

 

in your “outer” life (the real stuff) are largely a result of what you feel inside. If you concentrate each day on being safe; wear your seat belt, turn the stove off, clean clutter off of the steps, you are most likely to act safely at work. You won’t put on your safety glasses or hard hat because you were instructed to do so, you wear them because you don't want to get injured by something entering your eye or hitting your head.

 

Driving has a similar trend; if you drive to and from work while darting in between traffic, breaking hard and following closely; you are prone to drive the same on business trips. Unhealthy practices put you and your coworkers at risk.

 

I have seen numerous energy drinks and vitamins that suggest an increase in concentration. Ultimately, I believe it is an acquired behavior. Take a concentrated effort to review the events of your day and determine for yourself if they were a result of concentration or lack thereof.  Try concentrating on positive results/outcomes and make up your own minds.  Either way, concentrating on the negative certainly can’t be good and these days we need as much positive energy floating around as we can get.