“I do it to be independent,” McCoy said.

He doesn’t have to rely on an electric company in fair or foul weather for air conditioning, light or hot water.

“In a storm, the electricity can go off and every house on the street will be dark,” McCoy said. “I come outside, flip a few switches, and then I can have coffee. They can’t. It’s great.”

With a wind turbine and two sets of solar panels, the Troy resident generates between 50 and 75 percent of his household energy needs.

The equipmnet, installation and wiring cost him about $10,000.

“It’s expensive to start,” McCoy said. “And you have to do your homework, but it’s worth it.”

His monthly electric bill has been chopped in half, he said, since making the transition from electric to solar power a decade ago.

A wind turbine was McCoy’s first addition.

“In 1995, I got to thinking about wind generators,” McCoy said. “I talked to some people in Austin, and they said we don’t have enough wind out here for it to work.”

He stopped talking for a moment, so that he could point to the turbine in his yard. The propellors of the wind turbine went round and round like the blades of a ceiling fan.

“Well, it’s making electricity now,” McCoy said. “We’ve got wind enough to run one, but we don’t have enough wind to utilize the cost of the system - the inverters, batteries and wiring. All of that costs more than what the wind brings in.”

The game wasn’t lost, though.

After reading several books about solar energy and asking the advice of experts, McCoy learned that a few solar panels would generate enough energy to make both the solar and wind sysems cost efficient.

“They balance each other out,” McCoy said. “There’s days you have sun and wind, and some you have one or none.”

Excess energy gets stored in a 240-volt battery system.

“When the battery gets drained, the house switches over to the electric grid,” McCoy explained. “That goes on long enough to get the battery recharged.”

In storm-related power outages, McCoy’s residence is unaffected.

“The storming wind powers the lightbulbs,” McCoy said. “We have everything we need when that happens. We don’t have to go without.”

Learning how to utilize solar and wind power took McCoy some time and effort.

“For a layman like me, it’s a complicated system,” McCoy said. “I had to read a thick stack of papers. Some of it I could do, but for some of it, I needed professional help.”

McCoy said he also needed to learn how energy worked.

“I had to figure out how many amps I used everyday, how much electricity I used and how much energy each appliance required,” McCoy said. “I realized that you make your coffee and then you unplug the machine. If you leave it plugged in, your drawing in amps that get wasted.”

After analyzing his home’s energy consumption, several of the household appliances said goodbye to wall plugs. Propane now powers the kitchen stove and the clothes dryers. The freezer runs on a 24-volt battery. And McCoy swapped the electric water heater for a gas-heated, tankless one.

“There’s no difference in the quality or way you use these,” McCoy said. “It’s just as fast; I don’t care how long you run it.”

When his wife needed her computer, he opted to power it with a battery.

“For what she needed, that worked fine,” McCoy said. “There was no sense in having it plugged in all the time.”

Shortly put, the couple’s lifestyle changed.

“We had to think about what we were doing,” McCoy said. “Once we understood it, it wasn’t hard to adapt.”

--tlunsford@temple-telegram.com