- A few years ago, my wife and I sat down
and made a family sustainability plan
with the idea that if we were smart about it,
we could help the planet by reducing our emissions
and save a ton of money.
So in almost three years,
we've accomplished just about everything on that list,
and that has led us to be able to pay
less than one dollar per day for electricity
for almost those entire three years.
So let's dive in and I'll show you what I did
to save money here and the planet,
and see if we might work out for you.
(upbeat music)
Our strategy is actually pretty simple,
and it has mostly two parts.
Let's start with part one, going solar.
Solar is something that isn't right for everyone,
be is right for a lot of people,
and now thankfully, Google has this really awesome tool
to help you see exactly whether or not
solar is gonna be right for you.
So on Google Project Sunroof,
it's a really cool tool where are you punch in
your address and see whether or not solar is right for you.
In this case, I just want to explore some areas,
so I'm gonna go to the data explorer
and have a look at Seattle, a place where you may not think
is one that's right for solar energy.
And looking at the results here,
you can see that, yeah, the sunlight on the rooftops
aren't great, but 85% of buildings are solar viable,
meaning that the way that the roofs are structured
and everything else would do well to add solar energy.
When you go down, you can see the roof space,
the number of roofs, all of this kind of stuff,
the types of roofs, the installs, all that kind of stuff,
and see exactly what the potential is for this market.
So let's go over now to an area that does work
extremely well, where I live in southern California.
And here you can see just the bright yellow compared to
the darker shadier colors that we saw in Seattle,
which just gives you an idea
of how good an area is for solar.
Now again, you can punch in which exact address here
and get more details, but I actually have a better tool
for that that's a bit more actionable,
and this is the one that I used to go solar
about three years ago,
and this tool is from EnergySage,
and it's a solar calculator.
Like many of them out there,
this is the actually one I used though,
so I wanted to show this because I think it's
one of the best ones out there.
You punch in your address like I've done here,
and you drag the map, the little dot here,
over your actual roof to see exactly
whether or not it's right for you,
then you punch in your electricity bill.
Mine at the time was right here, around $150,
and it runs the numbers for you.
It looks at the roof size, orientation,
rates, incentives, all kinds of stuff,
and seeing exactly what's going on with solar in your area.
Then it gives you the results,
and the big deal here is it shows you the results,
how much money you're gonna save
over the life of the solar installation.
As you scroll down, you can see that
there are three different options it presents,
paying in cash, doing a $0-down loan, or a $0-down lease,
and this is an interesting way that
a lot of people are being able to get solar
without having to come out of pocket.
Then as you scroll down, you can kind of see how that works
in terms of the payback period
and then property value increasing, et cetera, et cetera.
So looking on EnergySage, you can really quickly
just get a sense of the value that solar
may bring to your specific address,
and all the different kind of financing options.
Now let me address one thing that may have popped out there
is that this is a long-term investment.
This isn't something that you're looking to save money
on your electricity bill tomorrow,
but it can be something that will start
to pay back much sooner depending on where you live
and your energy needs.
So to get the actual, real detailed information,
you can do what I did, which is to sign up at EnergySage,
give then your electricity bill and do the map thing
and show them your roof line,
and then you get bids from installers
without sharing your personal information with them,
meaning they're not gonna spam you.
This is literally what I did to get solar,
so go check them out.
I have become an affiliate for them,
but there's no added cost to you
and it does help kind of grow the channel and everything,
so I'll put a link in the description down below
if you want to check out EnergySage
and take it to the next step.
Prior to getting solar installed at my house,
I was paying $157 a month in electricity,
which included me working from home full time,
my wife and one-year-old which were also home full time,
and our one electric car that we had recently purchased.
Immediately following our install of solar,
our bill dropped dramatically,
averaging $15 a month for the next 12 months,
which includes these non-bypassable charges,
which are right around $10-12 a month.
I know, I know, they want you to pay
just to be connected even if you're not
taking any energy out, but hey,
there are a lot of things that I pay
more than 10 bucks a month for that are far less important
than having reliable electricity, so I'm okay with it.
Then we got another electric car, a Tesla Model 3,
and I was charging outside of home,
so something really shifted much,
but once I moved back home to my studio
in December of 2018, our bill shot up dramatically again.
At that time, I dug in and found that
I could switch my electricity plan
to where I got charged different rates
at different times of day and then control
when I charged my cars to kind of wash that out
and save more money, so I did that
and the price started to drop again
and our bill started to normalize.
So while this wasn't a part of our strategy initially,
it turned out to be a super valuable piece,
this whole time of use rates, or TOU plans
as you may see them called.
You can use it to your advantage
if you can control when you consume your energy
versus when you send it back to the grid,
and the way it works is that at certain times of day,
you'll get charged a higher price than others,
and if you can then be selling energy back to the grid
at that time, you will be essentially making more money,
and then go back and refill that at a later time
when the prices are lower.
And this is where our second major part of our strategy
came into play, these are our Tesla Powerwalls.
With our Tesla Powerwall being installed in August 2019,
we were able to once again start charging
both of our EVs at home and save even more
with what's known as peak shaving.
The idea here is what I kind of mentioned earlier,
where we have a Powerwall and it allows us to configure
when we are going to pull energy from the grid
versus our own batteries.
So with this, what we do is we charge our cars
from 12 to 6 a.m. at a super low rate,
nine cents per kilowatt hour.
Then we kick on and solar energy pulls up
and we start living off of our solar energy
for most of the day, then when the rates get super high
at 4 p.m., we flip over to running
all of our energy needs off of the Powerwall.
This way, any excess solar energy
is being sold back to the grid.
So we're buying energy at nine cents a kilowatt hour
and selling it back to the grid at 53 cents a kilowatt hour.
Buy low, sell high, simple, right?
This also works because in California,
like 37 other states and territories in the US,
we have what's called net energy metering, or NEM.
This is where as an energy producer,
I am able to sell energy back to the grid
and get credited for that, and the way it works specifically
is I am credited at the same rate
of which energy would cost during that time.
So when I switch my house to running on my Powerwall
at that peak rate of 53 cents a kilowatt hour,
and then all of my solar energy
which is still being generated goes back to the grid,
I am being credited at that 53 cents a kilowatt hour
during that time, then when the prices drop
to nine cents a kilowatt hour from that 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.
what they call super off peak,
I fill up my cars, and if need be,
I fill up the Powerwalls.
Now this might sound a bit fishy,
like it's not gonna work,
but the deal is, this really helps the grid
by essentially taking my house offline
during the toughest time when it has that peak demand.
So the energy companies have no issues with this,
and the states and everyone else that regulated it,
so that way, I'm getting a fair deal by doing this,
and it does help the long-term strategy
of maintaining the grid.
And what I do is, I actually kind of take it a step further
by mostly filling up the Powerwalls from solar,
so that nine cents a kilowatt hour rate
really is just reserved for charging my electric cars,
which with 80 kilowatt hours in one
and 90 kilowatt hours in another,
is an absolute ton of energy.
Thankfully, we're not driving a ton right now,
but those would absolutely destroy the Powerwalls
in terms of just eating up all the energy there
and going back to the grid anyways,
leaving them completely depleted for the following day.
So to take it a step further, the way I have it set up is
I do that peak shaving technique,
where my house is essentially off-grid
from four to nine p.m. when it's that highest rate.
Then I go back to the grid when it's the lowest rate
of nine cents a kilowatt hour from 12 to 6 a.m.
is when I pull the most energy, and then other than that,
I'm living on solar and feeding
as much back to the grid as possible.
Any excess that is from the energy being used
during the day with my wife and two kids home,
and me here in our home studio working.
So if you add it all up, over the past 12 months,
I've paid an average of 86 cents per day for electricity,
and since the Powerwalls,
that average has dropped to 60 cents per day.
Now remember, that isn't just the energy being used
in the home for air conditioning and TV and whatever else,
that includes two electric vehicles.
So that means all of our essentially gas money
that we would be spending as well,
is included in this rate of 60 cents per day
since we got our Powerwalls installed.
Now of course, there is a cost associated
with getting solar and Powerwalls
and setting up all of this stuff,
but I'll save that for a future video
when I have kind of more data
and I can give you a more complete picture,
but right now if you do want to go a little bit further,
check out this video over here
where I talk about my Powerwall install,
how it went and the cost and everything that I went through
to get these two Powerwalls installed at my house.
So thanks for watching, let me know what you think.
Please like, share, subscribe, leave a comment down below,
and don't forget, when you free the data,
your mind will follow.
I'll see you back here in the next one.