Billldg
My Gem Tang Is Watching You
Sorry, but this thread is kinda like a person buying a Ferrari and complaining about the cost of insurance. 
Power usage, holy crap!
- Thread starter peffy03
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pbrown
Active Member
I live in CA and have solar, a generator (due to our recent fires). Generator was $800 and can run on gas or propane.
My brother also built me a lithium power pack that has 12 large batteries (?) that can run my house for two weeks - including refrigerators and 3 tanks (2 fresh/1 salt). No air conditioning, but everything else. It is the size of a medium suitcase. Heavy as heck but wow...it got me through a week without power in September due to the NorCal fires. I am trying to talk him into selling these.
Dr. Dendrostein
Marine fish monthly
Here in southern California our kilowatt per hour charge is anywhere from .13 cents all the way up to $0.20.
7kw in a month here is $ 44 at .20 a kw.
Most everywhere else in the US it's higher almost double. Bummer
Dr. Dendrostein
Marine fish monthly
Don't forget I get a patent first. It helps something
I just went thru same thing with sunrun came out did there speech and I about had heart attack when I was told 33,000 for the install. I asked to please help me understand why it would be worth it they told me after 14years I would start to see a benefit from it. I laughed and told them who knows if I will even live that long then they try to sell me on how happy the next home owner will. E to buy the house with solar on it as they explain to me the new owner will still have to pay the 150$ a month on top of electric bill. I told them to please leave my house and kept the 33,000 in my pocket
Oh I forgot to mention that my energy use is so much that they wanted to cover the complete top roof of my house and my garage both have new roofs less then 3 years old and would be completely full of holes after that. Still only getting me at 60% or so. I am also one of the people being told I use 3-4x as much electricity as my neighbors. Somewhere about 4,000kw a month average
It blows my mind how many different angles they approach you with just to justify their ripoff practices.
This is why they want to see your usage to see how much they can tweak their prices so that it makes sense to a stupid consumer.
So with record-low energy prices currently in effect, my friends in Brooklyn are seeing $.35/kwh and their bills going from high $300 to mid $500 month to month.
How's it looking for you?
How's it looking for you?
fish farmer
2500 Club Member
My current KWH in Vermont is $.172/kwh, Back when this thread was, Summer 2020 it was $.168/kwh and the bill is about the same, high when I run A/C, hot tub. space heaters.
It's funny that this thread popped back up. I had a couple of issues with power outages after I last posted . This lead to some research via a relative of mine in the management side of a power company. He basically said that I should not bank on power prices being the same in a couple of years as their projections on Fuel prices plus the added market of EV's etc had shown massive increases are coming and wont be going away.
A few days later I started to research going solar and getting enough equipment that I could go off the grid, but would start with enough battery power to cut only 50% of my energy bill. Due to the panels needing to be on the roof two stories up I needed an Installer for that and a certified electrician for the final hookup to the Grid.
Everything else from Inverter Installation, Batteries, Trunking and wiring I decided I would do myself during the Covid down time.
Three months later it was all done and I now have 10.2KW of solar on my roof and 21Kw of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries Installed. I was always a staunch opponent against solar because the prices made no sense but with the massive price drops in solar equipment and with these new kind of LFP batteries it now makes a lot of sense. My batteries have an expected 14 year lifespan with over 6000 full recharge and discharge cycles.
I decided to go first class with the Inverter and bought a Sol-Ark 12K unit. It has a 4ms response time to blackouts so my whole house is literally on a huge UPS. I cannot even tell when a power outage has happened! I can also program it as to when the batteries take over powering the house at night.
I can run everything in my House including the AC's\Heat Pumps from 10pm to 7:30am on battery and the Sun is just up enough at that time to take over powering the House and start recharging the batteries. By 11:30am the batteries are typically recharged and the remaining solar is just powering the house and heating hot water. I am currently 75% off the Grid and only use Utility power between 5pm and 10pm.
If I get another 10Kw more of batteries I will be totally off the Grid and since my system is designed to handle 50KWh of batteries so I could go even further if needed.
Conclusion:
Well I must admit it brings a smile to my face when I see all the houses down the road are in darkness while mine is lit up and we did not even realize when the power had gone is amazing. I have cut my electric bill down to a very small sum and I feel a lot better going into Hurricane season with this in place.
Also it's pretty cool to crank up the AC in the day and know that those Hot cloudless days outside are actually allowing me to cool my house even more and for free.
I just got a recent electric bill and noticed another big price hike on it for fuel charges.
I suspect that given all that is going on and all that is to come this is going to be a very worthwhile investment.
Lastly don't believe all the stuff you hear. I can tell you for a fact that if you put up 10Kw of solar Panels you will get nearly 10Kw out of them if the sun is shinning on them. Even on a blanketed cloudy day I get enough power to keep the house running and charge the batteries. It only those extremely low lying dark clouds passing by that will totally kill the solar power.
As for Prices, that is also not 100% accurate. You can spend anywhere from $10K to $40K and get very comparable systems in performance. It all depends on do you want, top of the line equipment or do you want budget equipment with some manual input needed.
Batteries are by far the most expensive part of the system. I can buy 5.1KWh Lithium Iron Phosphate battery packs anywhere from $3500 to $1500 both with a 10 Year warranty. The difference is I trust the $3500 one a lot more and I know the company will be around in 10+ years.
A few days later I started to research going solar and getting enough equipment that I could go off the grid, but would start with enough battery power to cut only 50% of my energy bill. Due to the panels needing to be on the roof two stories up I needed an Installer for that and a certified electrician for the final hookup to the Grid.
Everything else from Inverter Installation, Batteries, Trunking and wiring I decided I would do myself during the Covid down time.
Three months later it was all done and I now have 10.2KW of solar on my roof and 21Kw of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries Installed. I was always a staunch opponent against solar because the prices made no sense but with the massive price drops in solar equipment and with these new kind of LFP batteries it now makes a lot of sense. My batteries have an expected 14 year lifespan with over 6000 full recharge and discharge cycles.
I decided to go first class with the Inverter and bought a Sol-Ark 12K unit. It has a 4ms response time to blackouts so my whole house is literally on a huge UPS. I cannot even tell when a power outage has happened! I can also program it as to when the batteries take over powering the house at night.
I can run everything in my House including the AC's\Heat Pumps from 10pm to 7:30am on battery and the Sun is just up enough at that time to take over powering the House and start recharging the batteries. By 11:30am the batteries are typically recharged and the remaining solar is just powering the house and heating hot water. I am currently 75% off the Grid and only use Utility power between 5pm and 10pm.
If I get another 10Kw more of batteries I will be totally off the Grid and since my system is designed to handle 50KWh of batteries so I could go even further if needed.
Conclusion:
Well I must admit it brings a smile to my face when I see all the houses down the road are in darkness while mine is lit up and we did not even realize when the power had gone is amazing. I have cut my electric bill down to a very small sum and I feel a lot better going into Hurricane season with this in place.
Also it's pretty cool to crank up the AC in the day and know that those Hot cloudless days outside are actually allowing me to cool my house even more and for free.
I just got a recent electric bill and noticed another big price hike on it for fuel charges.
I suspect that given all that is going on and all that is to come this is going to be a very worthwhile investment.
Lastly don't believe all the stuff you hear. I can tell you for a fact that if you put up 10Kw of solar Panels you will get nearly 10Kw out of them if the sun is shinning on them. Even on a blanketed cloudy day I get enough power to keep the house running and charge the batteries. It only those extremely low lying dark clouds passing by that will totally kill the solar power.
As for Prices, that is also not 100% accurate. You can spend anywhere from $10K to $40K and get very comparable systems in performance. It all depends on do you want, top of the line equipment or do you want budget equipment with some manual input needed.
Batteries are by far the most expensive part of the system. I can buy 5.1KWh Lithium Iron Phosphate battery packs anywhere from $3500 to $1500 both with a 10 Year warranty. The difference is I trust the $3500 one a lot more and I know the company will be around in 10+ years.
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FurrierTransform
Active Member
Your $0.41/kWh must be the cost for tier 3; the lower tiers are cheaper. And you don't say where in California you live, but if you use A/C, that really jacks up the price and usage.
I'm glad my power cost is low @ ~0.045¢ per kWh. Although I would very much like to get solar and batteries so thank you @robbyg for the informational post above!
Uh... Where do you live? Gonna guess you are way south of me. Otherwise the math and prices have changed an awful lot in 3 years. I drive a Tesla, so I am not a hater. Just could not make the math work at all.
Yes much further south but it's kind of a myth that Solar needs super bright sunlight to provide adequate power.
BTW, Yes the math has changed a lot in the last two years! I would have never gotten solar two years ago. The prices of panels, Inverters and Batteries have gone down significantly.
The main change that has hit the market is LFP batteries. Super long lasting with 6000+ cycles of energy. Some companies claim they will last 20 years but realistically I am told it's about 14 years.
Below is the calculator/Bible that everybody should use before investing. It will let you see what amount of power you will produce each month of the year for your location. I found it to be about 95% accurate in predicting what my system would produce each month versus what I am actually getting now that it is running.
https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/
Solar is not for everyone, but it's one of the few investments that you can add to your house that actually pays back money and gives you a peace of mind against blackouts and changes that may happen in the future with energy prices.
I would never cut the utility power to my house but I just want it to be a standby source of power for days when it is totally overcast. I can use my generator but that is more expensive to run than the utility power by a wide margin.
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