How's it going everyone? Back here in the herb garden,
just trying to relax and enjoy the day,
but I'm still filming a video for you guys. I've got my Sunday best on for you.
These sloppy gardening clogs and some workout gear.
We're talking about the solar update. So,
many of you who've followed this channel for a while,
know that I put solar in roughly six months ago, almost to the day.
It's like six months and about 10 days or so.
And I figured it's a great time period to look back and see how worth it
it's been, just in this first six months of operation.
So I asked you guys some questions a while back actually,
and scroll through my old video,
just to see what were the things that you really wanted to know.
So I'm going to answer as many of those as I can in this video.
So here's a look at my system. You can see the charge today.
So today we've generated about 13 kilowatt hours. This is August 17th.
But what we want to do is do a custom range from the first date that we
started, which is the 8th of January,
and we'll run it about six months out. Just to take a look at what it might be.
So we'll run that to June 8th. Let's do that right there.
So let's go with Done and we'll see what we've generated here.
So we've generated 3.53 megawatts - megawatt hours.
And what you can see here is each of these panels,
it'll give you exactly how many kilowatt hours each of these panels has
generated.
So you can see there's a slight variation on the generation.
It's not by much, it's plus or minus about seven kilowatt hours,
which I think is pretty good. These all face southwest.
So let's go and take a look at some of these graphs and reports really quickly,
just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with.
I'm going to go back to that custom range.
So here you can see the actual energy generation on a daily basis.
It's very easy to see which days were cloudy. Look at March,
March 3rd was an extremely cloudy day. Either way, you can get a sense for this,
right? So you can see just like I said, today 13.19 kilowatt hours,
but lifetime we've produced 5.5 megawatt hours.
Now I haven't used anywhere near that much.
And I'm going to show you in a second on my energy side of things,
but let's go ahead and take a look at one more thing here, which is reports.
So we'll go with site energy production and we'll start it.
We'll just go all the way from start to the current date,
which is the 16th of August. And again,
you can generate all these different reports and I can take a look at what I've
generated. So there's a lot of different ways to slice up this data.
But now we need to go take a look at the San Diego Gas and Electric,
which is my electric company,
and see how much I've actually used in this same time frame.
So here we are over on my electric company's website and you can see my cost and
usage on a monthly basis.
So let's go with usage first and you can see,
this August 31st that you see right here is actually 2020.
So this is when I didn't have any solar at all.
So you can see my on peak, my off peak and my super off peak,
which those are the three different tiers of usage.
I have what's called a time of use plan. So super off peak is the cheapest,
off peak is the second cheapest and then on peak,
which I believe is 4:00 to 9:00 PM, is the most expensive energy.
So there's a couple of different ways you can approach your energy management,
but we'll get into that maybe in a different video. So you can see, you know,
my energy keeps going up and up.
I was probably doing some heating at this point in time,
but then January I used quite a bit of energy.
This was my test month to see. I was like, hey,
if I'm just a little bit careless with my energy use,
how much would I actually be using? And it turns out, you know,
we got up to almost 600 kilowatt hours, which is a lot.
It's actually quite a bit. Now,
as soon as we got our solar on the 8th of January,
we can see that the months thereon after we've gone into the negative every
single month.
Let's now take a look at the actual cost of my electricity on a
month by month basis. So January we had $190 of charge,
and then now we've got $9, $10,
negative $164.
Now these actually could have been a little bit better because I didn't switch
my electricity plan to a solar time of use until April.
So I actually missed two months of earning those negative credits,
which I explained in this video.
So I could have actually built a bigger bank of negative credits and I would
have been in a better spot, but it is what it is.
Now you can see just this connection fee is all I'm paying right here, $10.
And then I've actually earned a little bit into the negative because it's been a
good month for electricity generation in August right now.
So let's take a look at what my billing would be.
So take a look here January 5th, 2021 - 33 days in the cycle,
I had a $190 charge like you guys saw. And the amount was due right then.
Now as February ticked in, just add that $10.
Remember I didn't put in that solar time of use plan so I could have actually
been earning that backwards, but I didn't. Didn't do it again here. My mistake,
as soon as I said, oops, I need to turn that on, I did in April.
And you can see,
I started eating away at that amount that was due to the point where the
only thing that's ticking upwards is that monthly connection fee that you can't
avoid. And then as soon as August comes around,
they readjusted based on my new energy generation.
So my bill is truly a negative bill up to a maximum of
$10 a month, which factors into my payback period.
So here we get to the magical number of the payback period.
And so this is a bit rough because I have those three different types of billing
- the super off peak, the off peak and the on peak billing.
But I did a rough average of my price per kilowatt hour, which is 27 cents.
So I'm going to put that in here. I'll put my system cost in at about $12,500.
And then my yearly energy usage is somewhere around let's
just say 500 to 600ish kilowatt hours per
month.
So we're going to say it's going to be 6,000 to about
7,800. So we're going to split the difference. Let's just say 6,500,
well let's just say 7,000 just to be, you know, on the conservative side.
And then what we will do is we'll include that 26% federal tax credit because
this number is the price I paid in cash for the system. It doesn't include that,
which gets deducted out of your costs. So let's calculate that out.
And my payback period is roughly 4.89 years. Now that's very,
very aggressive because my energy price is pretty high here in San
Diego.
So if you're in an area where you're either not getting as much production or
you're not getting, you know, you're not using that much energy,
it does really change the solar equation.
But in my area with the amount of sun we get and the price per kilowatt hour
that you're actually paying for energy, it makes a ton of sense. So.
Let's start out first with a really common question.
It is how efficient are the panels on cloudy days?
So it's hard to know exactly because no sunny day and no cloudy day are really
the exact same, but I did pull some data from yesterday, Sunday,
which was a perfectly sunny day. And then the day prior, Saturday,
was about overcast, maybe 75%, 85% with a very, very light sprinkle.
So certainly not an ideal day for solar generation. So on the sunny day,
Sunday, I generated 31 kilowatt hours of energy off of my system,
which is a 4.74 kilowatt hour system.
So that's sort of your baseline - peak summer, peak sunniness, right.
Now in peak summer, just the day prior, but overcast,
most of the day I generated 24.31 kilowatt hours. Which I did the math,
it's like 19ish% to 20ish% decrease.
And so I would say roughly somewhere in that range,
20% to 25% decrease in kilowatt hour production or energy production is what you
can probably expect on an overcast day.
Or just if you live in an area that is more overcast more often,
your theoretical limit is going to be maybe 25% higher
than the one that you're actually getting because it's cloudy most of the time
in your area. The next one is really, really common.
It's did you get a battery backup system,
like a Tesla power wall or any of those various storage systems so you can run
fully off grid if the power were ever to go out?
This is actually something I didn't know.
When I started out doing the solar thing is I thought,
naively but understandably, that when you get solar,
the energy that's being generated on the panel is going directly into your
house. It's actually not true. At least here in California,
what's happening is the energy that's being generated by the solar is going
straight back into the grid. And then I'm using energy directly from the grid.
Even when I have solar. The solar energy,
if you were to like really track the actual production out of that system,
doesn't really flow through into my home.
But what the energy company does is they just take the net difference, right?
So I have something called net energy metering.
And so if my power went out for example, my solar would be out,
which means I wouldn't be generating energy and I have nowhere to put it.
So if my power goes out, because I don't have a battery,
I don't have a place to store the energy,
which is a bad thing if I really care about that.
So one of the biggest reasons to get a battery is because you want full off grid
protection for 24 or 48 hours,
depending on how much storage you actually buy because of having a battery.
Right? And so it's a really good emergency situation.
And then the other good reason to get a battery,
which is one that I might consider down the road.
The reason why I haven't bought a battery is basically because for the amount of
kilowatt hours you can store relative to the current cost of battery tech,
I just feel that the equation is imbalanced. I don't think it's worth it for me.
However, if I was ever to get like an electric car,
this could be a really good situation. And I'll tell you why. So my friend Ben,
over at Ben Sullins on YouTube, is a sustainable tech YouTuber.
What he does - he has electric cars,
he has solar - is he does basically what's called rate arbitrage.
So here in San Diego, I have what's called time of use energy billing.
And so based on the time of the day, right now for example is peak energy hours.
Everyone's running their dishwashers, they're cooking, they're microwaving,
they're using their fridges, all that kind of stuff. So between 4:00 to 9:00 PM,
my energy rates are really high per kilowatt hour. Whereas at 2:00 AM,
they're very low.
And so what Ben will do is he'll run his whole house off of his battery during
the peak hours of energy cost. And then during, you know,
the low hours he'll charge his battery back up, he'll charge his cars,
he'll schedule his laundry to run at like 2:00 AM, stuff like that.
So you can do something called rate arbitrage as soon as you get a battery,
because you need that bank to kind of play. You're almost like an energy trader.
You're playing the market a little bit.
So that would be another reason to get it. I don't have one.
Maybe in a year or two I'll consider it,
especially if I get an electric vehicle. Another question,
what's the life expectancy of the panels and can parts of them be recycled?
So I'm not the best person to ask on the recycling question.
I'll probably defer to someone like Ben, you can go check his channel out.
But as far as the life expectancy, my Panasonic panels,
I have Panasonic and they are rated for 25 year warranty.
So at the very least I'm covered for 25 years no matter what.
I would say the drop-off rate seems to be somewhere around 25ish%
in efficiency at that level. So I'm thinking 25 years out,
20 years out, I'll probably be at 80% to 75% production.
So let's say I was getting 10 kilowatt hours a day out of one panel,
which is not a realistic number, but let's just say that's what it was.
In 25 years I might be getting something like 7.5 kilowatt hours.
So it wouldn't be broken immediately as soon as the warranty runs out.
It would just become less efficient over time.
And at that point you have to think, 25 years have passed,
who knows what type of energy systems we'll be able to be using or how advanced
solar tech will be. So at that point, once the warranty's up,
it might make sense to swap it. And I will, at that point,
really hope that you can recycle most,
if not all of the components that are in these so they can be reused for the
future.
So a lot of you are curious about the solar rebate program that I mentioned in
the initial install video. And so I'll just explain that a little bit more here.
So basically in California, at least in 2020, I believe it was extended,
but I'm not quite sure - there was a 26% tax credit on any expense
to own and install your solar panels. So let's for round numbers,
let's just go with this - $10,000 to install the panels and own them.
So you have to own them. It has to be an operation.
And then you can actually also rebate out any sort of roof work you need to do
in order to get the panels operational on the roof. And so for me,
I had to do a roof. Many of you have watched that roofing video.
It's actually a pretty fascinating video.
I love actually rewatching it just to see how that roof got built.
But I was able to expense both that AND the solar cost and wrap that
into the rebate program. So in my case,
I spent $12,500 in cash on the solar,
right. Then the roof, I could only expense maybe 75% of it or so,
so it's probably around another $12,000. So I'm in for $24,000 on the solar,
plus the roof that was related to the solar.
And then 26% of that was about $6,400 that I got a tax credit on.
So basically reduced my tax burden by that much earned income,
which means that I got a pretty decent tax credit back, which is nice,
really nice. So let's take my situation now,
let's make it a little bit more real.
I paid about $12,500 cash to own the solar system, get it installed.
And then I also paid about $17,500 for the roof,
but I couldn't deduct the entire roof.
So about 75% of the roof I was able to deduct, per my CPA.
And what we were able to do then is say, okay,
let's call that $24,000 just for simplicity. 26% of that I got a credit back on,
a tax credit back. So about $6,400 in a tax credit.
And that's how the rebate system works, at least here in California.
Your state's probably going to vary. You may not have one,
you may have a better one, or you may have a different type of program where,
you know, the install is free and you pay some sort of loan,
something like that. But it was a great incentive. I believe in California,
it's ramping down slowly and then eventually going to commercial installs only
and then eventually just disappearing completely. But man,
it was fantastic to be able to deduct a lot of the solar and a lot of the actual
roof.
It helped the cost cause I put a lot of money into this house as soon as I moved
in. And anything that like took a little bit of pain off the table,
I was here for.
Another super common question is can you sell some electricity back to the
energy company? You know what?
This is the part that I get almost a little bit mad, a little upset.
It's not the worst in the world, but it does, the incentives are off.
I'll call it that. So here's what happens.
Let's say I use 500 kilowatts of power just living my life,
running my dishwasher, whatever, right.
And somehow magically I generate a thousand kilowatts in that same month.
So my net is actually a positive 500 kilowatt hours. You would think well,
I'm just giving the electricity company energy for free.
And that's exactly what you're doing. You do not get,
at least in California with San Diego Gas and Electric,
you do not get a payment for that 500 kilowatt hours at whatever that per
kilowatt hour price is. They don't give it to you.
Here's what they do do though and it's not even, it's not that bad.
It would just be nice to get the money. Here's what they do. So if I had,
you know,
let's extend this a little bit and say the prior two months I actually used
more. So I was plus a thousand kilowatt hours, right?
That's how much I owe the electricity company for.
And then let's say in this month I generated an extra thousand kilowatt hours
over what I used.
What they would do is they would apply my production to my past consumption and
they would net it out. And so I'd go back to owing them for nothing.
And so the best you can do, at least in my area,
is you can have no bill except for about a $10 a month connection fee that you
can't avoid. So 120 bucks a year you're in for no matter what. But besides that,
if you're producing more than you're consuming on the net across an entire
calendar year, you pay nothing for electricity. Which is fantastic!
Really common question - how do I clean my solar panels?
And how often do I do it? How do you do it? I like to get up on my roof.
I just do. I like to get up, the sunset is really nice up there.
I like to look at the garden and kind of plan different things out here at the
Homestead. Where's the coop going to go? Where's the compost bin going to go?
All that kind of stuff. And so I'll get up there and I will clean the panels.
But you want to do it outside of the heat of the day.
So I'll typically do it at sunset, right about now.
I'll pull my Hoselink up there,
pull out some extra slack in the hose and I'll take a gentle spray and just
spray off the dirt. I'll do this maybe once a month or so.
And typically you see about a 2% to 5% boost in production,
especially if it's really dusty or you have a lot of trees in your area,
a lot of debris, you know, that can actually really help a little bit.
So I think it's nice to go up and just clean the panels off, admire them.
I'm weird like that.
I like to go up and like have a little sparkling water and just like admire the
sunset and my energy system, whatever. That's what I like to do.
But that's how I clean my panels. Another one,
are you switching over to any sort of electric appliances now that you actually
are running free energy or roughly free energy? And the answer is yes.
So I have already switched over my laundry system. Didn't switch it,
I just bought electric appliances. So an electric washer is pretty standard.
Electric dryers actually not standard, but I did get one,
so I wouldn't have to run a gas dryer. So I have those in the pantry.
I replaced my fridge and dishwasher with high efficiency ones cause my flippers
actually just, I mean they put in the worst stuff, I swear.
It was 'technically' new, but it was like from like 1980.
And so both of them failed on me within a month, which is very frustrating.
I'm actually thinking about doing like an expose of everything the flippers did
to this house because the sloppiest, it was just very, very sloppy.
So let me know if you want to see that. But anyways,
the appliances that I still want to change. I have my gas water heater.
I'm going to switch that out for an electric heat pump water heater,
which is not only electric but a highly efficient electric water heater that
will perform as well as the gas one.
The only thing I'm not giving up yet is my gas range. I like cooking on gas.
My gas bill is maybe like $10 or $15 a month. It's not expensive.
It's not extensive. I'm not using that much.
So I don't feel too too bad about that. So for now I'm still cooking on gas.
Another question is any ideas of what you're going to do with the excess
production? So if you're producing, let's say 800 kilowatt hours in a month,
which is what I produced in June, then you're only using 500,
you're wasting or giving the electricity company for free 300 of those, right?
So you're sort of incentivized to just use more electricity,
which is the opposite I think of what you would want to incentivize as a
society.
You would want us to have sustainable energy systems on our property and then
you'd want to reward us for generating more energy than we consume.
And so it would be great if I could get paid for that. But given that I can't,
I might as well use it because at least I'm netting a zero footprint,
right? I'm not consuming more. So let's say if I generate 800,
I should be using 800. If I generated a thousand, I should be using a thousand.
So there's a lot of things that I'm thinking about doing.
So I'm probably going to install outdoor lighting here at the Homestead.
It'll probably be wired led lighting. So at least will be efficient,
but it will be wired into the system. It won't be a solar system.
I might wire up the shed with some ventilation and some grow lighting.
I might set up an entire growing system, like a hydroponic system,
like I used to do back in the early days of Epic Gardening.
So there's a lot more energy consumption that could come out of the Homestead.
Running the freeze dryer that I just got.
Running the dehydrator that I just got. Those could both do it. So we'll see.
Right now I'm still pretty content just not using as much as I produce and just
living my life that way. It's not a big deal. But that's it.
So hopefully this was helpful to you on, you know,
weighing the pros and cons of getting solar, getting batteries,
how much to invest, all that kind of stuff. And you know,
the beginning of the video,
hopefully having that little nerdy breakdown of the production and the
consumption and the payback period and all that was very helpful.
That's how I think about stuff is as long as the math works,
then the rest of the life equation kind of comes into play for me.
And that's where my opinion in the rest of the video came in.
So if you have any other questions about solar,
I'm happy to do updates as the years roll on. Drop them in the Comments.
But until next time, it's a nice sunset here, guys. I'm going to hang out.
I'm going to relax, have my sparkling water and just enjoy the garden.
So I'll see you on the next video.