what am i paying now and what am i going to be paying in the future? if i can make money today on my monthly payment and go green, why not? solar kind of reverses the effect. it's like tax brackets. the return on investment typically is higher if you got a big bill. there is also another thing about time of use rates. i want to go over it very briefly. it does have some effect and you will hear it about on your bid. the time of use rate is a way that you tilts are trying to help -- utilities are trying to manage their peak demand. you charge people more during peak periods. you make it up to them by charging the low market rate off peak. this is off peak and you'll be charged a very low rate for it. at shoulder peak you'll be charged more. at on peak, you'll be charged the most, another shoulder, another off peak. so what happens is that your production looks like this on

the hours of the day. you're going to produce more obviously during the suspect with peaking around noon. when you overlay the curve, they kind of look like this. so solar lines up very well with peak usage. remember when you're overproducing and selling during the day and buying at night, you can use this differential so you're selling high and buying low. that differential can actually use to your advantage depending on your lifestyle. ok, your paybacks ranges from eight to 18 years if you have to look at it that way from people who typically buy. the return anywhere from 5 to 15% or 18% or more on those big systems. so it's not a bad return for a very, very low risk investment. let's say you have 7% on p.v., you're going green. if you got that from your stocks, your principal would be going into risk. so anyway, stocks can go down as we well know. this is very solid. monthly cash flow, let's talk

about that. if you were to finance this by a home secured loan like i did on my home equity line of credit, that interest on that loan is tax deductible. if you do that and assuming that we have the same historical rate of escalation, you can start going cash flow positive from the first day. in other words your payback can be immediate, now. making money. are there any hidden costs? the inverter typically is has a 10-year warranty that will last about 15 years we're estimating and they're getting better all the time. the solar people will build that replacement cost into your financial analysis and maintenance. the only maintenance that i ever do on my panels is a keep them clean when the pollen starts going. i don't live in a dusty area and i don't have birds nesting above the panels. i discourage that for obvious reasons. if they're tilted, you're going to be fine. on a real test, the maximum

loss is around 7% even if they didn't wash them. most of the solar homes bought in the last five years and they're just starting to turn over. we're getting hard data on what this does to appraisal values. there has been some study that supports sort of the idea that, yeah, if two homes, all things being equal and the p.v. system looks decent, that if a home has $150 electric bill and this has a $10 a month, that going to be more valuable and have $140 available for mortgage payments, so you can pay more. we'll see if the figures will hold up. we need hard data to support that. it's very likely. there is also another thing about home ownership, california passed a solar rights act which is basically a law that basically supports solar, but it's very supportive law for h.o.a.'s and homeowners association and other condo things that can't privilege

allowsly oppose solar. it's hard to oppose on a don't like the look of it, obviously you want to get along with the neighbors, but the law is on your side. now you're thinking maybe i want to continue to do this. first off do the energy audit stuff and find an installer like you would do any other contractor. he takes care of the paperwork and the permits for you and floats the rebate. you just got to get one you like and want and sign those papers. how do you find an installer and how do you choose the ones you want? just like anyone else, you screen some people out, you do personal references, you check their website, you talk to them about the basics and ask for the address to see if you have some good roof space. if you decide it's ok for a salesperson to come out, they'll do that for you. it's all free. if someone tries to charge you for bids, almost no one will. pass on it. i want to give you the key information that you need to

compare bids properly. there is just one little area in there. there is a d.c. and an a.c. system size. i don't want to into details on that i want to make sure you get the right -- that's the only area of confusion that i have seen on bids that can affect the sales part of it. so first off, i want you to get the full price. that means the maximum you'll be charged. that includes any additional things that they may charge you because you have a difficult roof or steeply pitched roof or concrete tile or whatever they might see. you get that full price. that's before rebate, before tax credit. then you take the system size in cec, california energy commission a.c. watts. that term is understood by the people in the industry. that means they use the c.e.c. ratings to determine the a.c. wattage. you get the per watt price. you divide this by this. you get the price per a.c. watt. you want to ask about permit fees as well. each city typically will charge

fees. now those fees are coming down and we're working very hard to get them standardized and clear. there is some cost. sometimes the installers will pass that on to you. ask how they're dealing with it. you say, ok, what's my watt. let's see it was four d.c. but you'll have 18% less here, so that's the number you want, you divide this by that and you get that. so this would be 926 a watt. therefore, you can compare apples to apples. they have a standard calculator that they use on the web and they include that printout on your bid and they have to file that printout in your rebate application. so there is another possibility of lowering costs, the group buy. when i went, in i went in with a bunch of friends because i thought i wanted to bring people in because i knew all of these people, these greeny homeowners that were needing to walk the talk and because i brought a lot of businesses

vendor, they lowered all of our price because this economy is of scale. maybe that price can drop 50 cents a watt or more. that's another idea. there are ones that are just beginning where you can actually lease the system. you don't have to put any money up front at all. somebody else will own the system for you. you may pay an upfront cost a little bit that is less than what you might pay normally or some of them may not at all, depending on how they can make the finances work. the whole goal is to try to get you into p.v. with the least amount of resistance possible. instead of paying maybe the utility per month, you're going green and paying somebody else. thank you very much for your time. it's a pleasure. i'll take questions and i'll be here afterwards as long as you need me. thank you very much. [applause]

>> so that's it, solar basics. first we talked about the technology, how it works and how it all hooks together. then we talked about net metering and how that makes solar easy and worry-free and finally we talked about the incentives from the state and the federal government that lower the cost and makes solar affordable. for further information visit our website or come visit us in person. all the classes at the pacific energy center are free of charge. thanks for showing us an actual system being installed and thank you for being with us. hope to see you soon.

>> thank you all for coming, i would like to really briefly introduce bonnie angle with the breast cancer fund, she is going to do a presentation for you on prevention, ways to preventolin ks of chemicals in breast cancer and i'll let her talk about the rest, bonnie, thank you for coming. >> alright. thank you all so much for being here today. i'm very excited to be able to give this presentation to you, unfortunately, i was expecting to have a co-presenter who had a minor accident and visited the emergency room this morning instead of visiting us, so we have plenty of folks from the breast cancer fund and other groups on hand to answer questions, but we are missing our policy geru unfortunately,

i don't know how much this audience is familiar with it but we've also been meeting and talking about doing a study of exposures among women firefighters in particular, and so we have some members of that team talking about that here, sharl patton is back there, give a wave, and did rachel step out already? and rachel thought she was going to give a wave but she had to step out to go to another meeting, from the breast cancer fund, we have my two science leaders, [inaudible] and janet gray, so science questions galor, they can handle them all, policy questions, we'll have to deflect some of those to nancy for another time, so what i'm going to present today is what we call our healthy home and healthy world tours, i'll talk a little bit about who the breast cancer fund is and then

we're going to walk through kind of the rooms in your home talking about tips for avoiding exposures that are linked to breast cancer and i will talk a little bit about the different chemicals, where they're found, things you can do to avoid them and also some policies, and then we'll kind of go beyond the home to talk about the kinds of exposures that might be not within our control in the house but elsewhere. and it looks like i have videos so that is good. so, the breast cancer fund is a national organization that works to prevent breast cancer by eliminating the environmental exposures linked o the disease, mostly we talk about chemicals and radiation that are linked to breast cancer, we are a little different from your breast cancer organizations out there, we often associate breast cancer with pink ribbons and we're about to see an onslaught

of ribbons in our stores, we don't identify with pink because that's mostly associated with cures and treatments and we're on prevention, we're not affiliated with other breast cancer groups, there are all different breast cancer organize sashes that do their own agenda setting and we are an independent group that we have a board that helps us make decisions as an entity, we're not focused on a cure, we focus exclusively on prevention and environmental links to the disease, we don't fund individuals and there are some amazing organizations that do that work, they'll provide extra money for treatment or food and bill payment, that's not what we do, and we don't provide direct services like support groups or treatment or any of those things and there are other great organizations that do that work. we are an organization that translates and analyzes the science, i'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, we

work on public education, on policy initiatives, on web based and media advocacy, we have a lot of fun in that area so you should join us online and corporate accountability campaigns which i'll talk a little bit about later on in this presentation, we're really a community, so you can see pictures of different folks at different evens interacting and having a great time so we like to be hopeful that we can indeed prevent this disease and reduce the rates of breast cancer, and we have what we think is an amazing website that's full of all of the information that i'm going to present today and then some, so anything i talk about today, you can also find on our website which has rich information about the science, rich information about policy and ways that you can get involved, even by hiking in mount town this weekend and

helping us raise some funds so we have some folks doing that in the audience as well, so as i said, we are a science-based organization, everything we do a rooted in a rich foundation in the science, and so for the past decade in fact, every couple of years, we produce a document called the state of the evidence, janet gray has been the primary author of the last two -- is it two or three, two editions plus the one we're working on right now which will update a lot of that on our website in particular, we're planning to unveil some exciting stuff in the next year, and with that, we try to connect the dots between the environmental exposures and breast cancer, we look at the peer reviewed literature, all of that rich scientific stuff and janet gray turns that into information that we can all read at various levels, and from there, we kind of translate it into presentations

like this one, into policy needs and into tips on our website so we use that scientific foundation to do a lot of different things. i want to talk always about some of the themes that emerge pr the literature because that helps us understand why we're concerned about the particular chemicals which we are concerned, so some particular themes emerge in the literature that come up again and again across a number of different chemicals and the first of that is that early life exposures and exposures at other developmental periods are really important, so timing is as we're learning everything. another important concept is that low dose exposures matter, so we often talk about -- you'll hear like the dose makes the poison, we're finding out over time that that's not necessarily true in the sense

that more dose means more bad health outcomes, it's looking like in some cases very minute doses have really major effects, and i want to talk about why that might be, so you see here a picture of some different periods of development that are of concern and these share something really important in common, and that is that these are times when the body's own hormones are orchestrating some complex and amazing things, during the prenatal period where with regard to the breast, you know, the basic structures are being laid down and that is guided by the body's own hormones or during puberty when breasts start to develop, we know that teenagers are like hormonally out of control, the hormones are doing some things there, pregnancy and lactation, and our body's own hormones work at these amazingly small amounts

to make these big dramatic changes happen at these important periods of time, so it's not surprising perhaps that external chemicals na look to our body like hormones would have a somewhat notable effects at these same periods of development so that's an important concept that we're starting to see and chemicals that are endocrine disrupting compounds or hormone disrupters as you might hear them called are a big focus of the work we've been doing and of the data that's been emerging in the scientific literature in the last ten years so this is exciting stuff and we'll talk about specifics about that in a minute, another important theme that emerges that we were talking about our meeting earlier is that mixtures matter, it all adds upfinger so some of the chemicals i'm going to talk about you might be exposed to -- kids might be

exposed in toys and in food products and in personal care products and all of these different things, so that you get an accumulation of one kind of chemical or a set of like related chemicals from a bunch of different sources, and those might act on the same path that other chemicals from other sources do, so you have this whole mixture of an 80 thousand chemical soup that we all live in and those all combine together to have effects. we also know that those different chemicals and exposures interact with our own characteristics as people, where we were born, where we grew up, the environmental and social stressors that we may or may not have encountered as children and your genes, your diet, our lifestyle, our physical activity, also shape, how vulnerable we might be to those chemical exposures so those are some key concepts to

give a foundation for what we're going to get into now, and now we're going to get a little bit practical, so healthy homes, and here's our healthy, happy home, we're going to jump right on into the kitchen and we're going to jump into the cup board and talk about canned food, you might have heard of the chemical bpa, you'll see it on water bottles and baby bottles, and that means it does not have the chemical in it, bpa, what you might not know, it's not only in plastic but also in the lining of most food cans so you'll see this shiny layer if you open up a food can and also in a lot of the thermal receipt paper that you get, the kind that prints without making any noise, that can get on your skin, bpa is an endocrine disrupting compound and we sometimes call it the poster

child edc because there's over 200 studies linking bpa to different health effects and we know a lot more about how it works than we do about some of the other chemicals that we're exploring and policies are kind of moving forward more rapidly too so if we could knock down bpa, it would set a precedent for other laws and market based changes that could have a big domino effect on our exposures, especially to endocrine disrupting compounds, you go back to standard you may have used in college, i did when i didn't have any money was to soak the beans, it's way cheaper, avoids canned food exposure, also to go with frozen or fresh vegetables if you can rather than cans, to choose stainless steel water bottles and other alternatives for baby bottles if you have young children and to change

markets and to change laws because we know there are a lot of inequities that shapes who has access to healthy foods and fresh fruits,, we need to change some laws that these canned foods are safer, and more foods are available. we've gone into a can of corn, i don't know if you got that, we dove into this can of corn to talk about the bpa act, from representative ann marky from the house and senator from the senate, and this bans [inaudible] food and beverage containers, from infant and toddlers food, from everything, from adults, pregnant women, some important populations in there and requires the alternatives being considered for use is replacement be tested for safety in a

significant way, and that is really important because we're finding that some of the possible replacements might look just like bpa in a lot of ways or might have some worker concerns that may not be linked to breast cancer but might be linked to other health concerns for workers like asthma and breathing concerns, it's very important, we've seen 20 state bills be introduced in the last couple of years which is a lot, that's almost half of the nation's states, so we're jumping out of bpa and popping over to the microwave, so related to bpa are other plastics, and so we encounter these plastics all over in our world and some plastics are carcinogens, number 3, and number 6 which are vinyl chloride and styrene and number 7 which can contain bpa but

doesn't always, and there's also estrogenic activity, additives put into other plastics, so it's important to skip micro waiving in plastic, it leaks some of those chemicals into your food, i like to pop stuff into a ceramic bowl, put another ceramic bowl over it to create a lid and you're skipping the plastic. so, you can use stainless steel or glass for leftovers and overall, 1, 2, 4 and 5 are generally safer plastics but it's good to know that those additives even in those can lead to that so you want to be cognizant of that. going organic is another way to reduce exposures, to chemicals that you consume in the food but it has bigger effects because it's going to reduce the overall load of pesticides

in our environment that workers and farmers are exposed to and make our way into our air and water so those are important reductions that go beyond our own home and can affect everybody's health. some tips there are to choose hormone-free meats and milks in particular, to go with organic dried beans or organic frozen fruits or vegetables, some of our colleagues have the dirty dozen of foods to almost always buy organic and the clean 15, which are foods that you can kind of skip the organic because they have a stronger protective, like a ban ban na which has such a big peel, keeps those pesticides out, so if you're working on an economy of scale, you know, go with organic with the ones that have the highest levels of pesticides. our website has a link to those tips so i can show you where

that would be. and now we're going to pop into the living room and talk about flame retardants which are an important issue for any firefighters who are working in the field because it's those burns that are going to create exposures, so as folks in the home are thinking about that, once they found that frequent hand washing can reduce the actual levels of these flame retardants because we touch them, they get on our hands, they're in household dusts and make their way into our bodies, so washing them off our hands can reduce exposures, using a vak coupe with a hepa filter and a big move that could come down the pike is going down to legacy fabrics like wool and fabric that don't require the use of these mraim retardants at all and burn much more

slowly, this's been some amazing videos that you can look at that you may have seen that show the legacy fabrics burning so much more slowly than the flame retardant treated ones, so that's some important information to have and makeshifts toward slower burning fabrics. moving into the bathroom, we're going to dive into the cleaning cabinet first, so a big shift here, cleaning products, this is a big one because it's easy to make safe choices if you know what's in your products, you know what you don't want to buy and you know what you do want to buy, with cleaning products, they don't have to tell you anything about what's being used in those products, even your cosmetics have more labeling than your cleaning products, so one of the major thins is moving towards companies that tell you what

they use, particularly avoiding heavily fragrance products because that word fragrance, if you see that on any kind of label can contain dozens to hundreds of chemicals, some that could be likely to be endocrine disrupters, evelyn glycol, psb's, some tips here, and this is money saving too which is good because i've told you to buy organic and do all these other things, save some money by going with vinegar, baking soda, that's what i use in my home and you really can get your windows and your metals sparkling clean with vinegar, can get the grit off with baking soda, really effective things even in the laundry. we're going to jump right in and talk about some policy as we just covered cleaning products, they don't have the tell you what's in them, pass

laws that require labeling of cleaning products, one that is are used in industrial settings like schools, my dad is a high school custodian, i want him to not be exposed to chemicals where he doesn't know where they are or in the fire houses, what are they using there? what are being used in hospitals at times or universities, all of these institutions can make big changes in overall exposures with industrial cleaners but we have to know what's in them and requiring disclosure of any potential health effects with cleaning ingredients so we know what the concerns are, there's a lot of overlap between cleaning products and personal care products, with personal care products, they are labeled which is excellent, except they can still have that sneaky little word fragrance which can still contain dozens to hundreds of chemicals, some of

which may be endocrine disrupters like synthetic mosque, so wanting to avoid those and we're talking bath products, there's sometimes triclosan in tooth paste, we're talking stuff that men, kids, preteens are using, a whole gamete of stuff there, so going simpler, picking companies that really are telling you everything that's in your product so you can make informed choices, and also really being particularly cognizant with kid's products and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. so, there is this safe cosmetics act which works to phase out known carcinogens, genetic mute jens and reproductive toxins from cosmetics, right now, those are allowed to