- 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.
