Customer Profile: The Booth Family

Carey Booth and her daughters are going green at home in several ways. Carey’s main mode of transportation
is riding her bike, but when it’s raining or the family is going places together, they use their ZAP Xebra 3-wheel electric vehicle, painted like a zebra.

“Driving this is like being in your own parade,” says Carey. “Everywhere we go, people point, shout, wave, take our picture and ask lots of questions about it, which was partly my point in being an early adopter.”
The car has four doors, four seatbelts and a top speed of 40 mph. Carey says the car can go about 20 miles on an overnight charge, and that it costs only about 2 cents per mile for electricity.

“It plugs into a regular outlet in our garage or anywhere,” Carey says. “PGE is installing free charging stations around town, and I can plug in at work. I see it as appropriate technology for around town errands.”

In addition to driving green, Carey has made many energy-efficient updates to her home. She installed a new roof, solar hot-water panels, solar photovoltaic panels and a heat pump furnace, along with compact fluorescent light bulbs and more insulation and gap sealing.

Carey strives to garden green as well. She has one 55-gallon rain barrel in front of the house to water the front flower beds and a 550-gallon cistern in the backyard that collects water from the back half of the house roof plus the deck roof.

“Some of this ‘going green frenzy’ has been in the works since my teen years in the ’70s, reading the Whole Earth Catalogue,” Carey says. “Lately, it seemed like time to do something about global warming.”
You can find out more about Carey’s sustainable efforts and see photos of her home improvements here .