CAPE MAY POINT — They had to find some way of cutting down on their heating bills. After much study and investigation, it turned out there were only two options open to them: windmills or solar panels.
“We looked at gas and oil,” said Anthony Fucci, director of the Marianist Family Retreat Center. “We’ve been using electric heat, which is very costly. To convert to either gas or oil would have involved a lot of infrastructure work.”
The building housing the Marianist Family Retreat Center was built in 1875 and was used by John Wannamaker as his family’s summer cottage. Today, the center has 22 bedrooms with 55 beds and has retreats every weekend and weeklong ones in the summer for families.
“We’re open year round and hold about 75 retreats a year,” Fucci said. “We have retreats for high schools and private retreats during the day.”
Fucci pointed out that the three buildings that make up the center are made for electric heat, although natural gas would be cheaper for the center. “The cost to convert the whole center would have been astronomical,” he added.
He noted that the dining room and main chapel now use propane and the hot water is heated with propane.
“We were trying to look where it was financially feasible to convert and to what,” Fucci noted. “Solar heat won out.”
All the municipalities in Cape May are passing ordinances prohibiting windmills, he explained, because the properties, for the most part, are built very closely together and by design windmills sit atop 75-foot poles. “They don’t resemble the Dutch windmills,” Fucci said with a chuckle.
Trinity Solar of Freehold is the company that installed 95 panels measuring four-feet-by-six-feet on the roofs of the two of the buildings that had space for them. “We had to pick the roofs that fit the criteria for the installation of the panels,” he explained, “and the buildings face south and southeast which is a requirement for the panels to be very effective.”
Trinity — named for the three brothers who started the company — is located in six states and is the largest installer of solar panels in New Jersey.
Fucci said the wiring for the panels feed directly into the electrical system in the center. The solar panels create electricity and are shared with all three buildings.
The cost of putting in the panels was $119,000, of which $19,000 was a rebate from the state. “We expect the cost of the solar panels will be paid off within 10 years,” Fucci said. How much the center will save on electrical bills will be noted after a year “although we should see the savings beginning with the next utility bill,” he added.
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