There are a couple of items that I have learned over the last year of my foray into solar electricity. When you monitor and analyze your electrical usage on a daily basis you learn a lot more than when you just get the bill at the end of the month. So here are the items I have learned, in order of importance.
- Air conditioning is a HUGE ENERGY HOG
- Air conditioning is a HUGE ENERGY HOG and finally
- Air conditioning is a HUGE ENERGY HOG
- Conservation will only go so far, but is valuable
- Solar panels benefit from being cleaned.
Air conditioning is one, two & three on my list, because air conditioning instantly raises my electrical usage by 3-6 times. My home usually idles around 1,500 watts. This is the amount of power my home uses just sitting around. It is the result of two refrigerators, my pool pump, several computers and a lot of electrical “do dads”.
My home, being a two story house, has a split system. One AC unit for upstairs and one for down. The upstairs unit draws around 5,000 watts and the downstairs unit draws about 4,000 watts. If both these systems were running simultaneously, it adds 9,000 watts to my electrical usage or 6 times my base level usage. This is why at the end of a hot month, opening your electric bill can be scary.
So herein lies my dilemma, which solar has eliminated. Be frugal or be happy. I was raised by depression era parents, so even though I have air conditioning I have never really used it. Maybe I am cheap, but I don’t mind sweating. I like Bikram yoga, my wife doesn’t. My wife doesn’t like being hot. Her body overheats and then she gets crabby. She states that if it is over 85 degrees, she can no longer work. So for the last 15 years, since I built my home, I have avoided using the air con. The person who suffered the most was my wife. It’s hard to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. I like going out running in the middle of a 90 degree day. Most people think this is crazy.
After one year of solar, I have marital bliss. I intentionally built out my system with more capacity with the knowledge that I would finally use air conditioning. There is freedom in knowing that headed into the hot summer months, I have built up a credit with SCE, that should be used before the year is out. I went from “Don’t turn on that expensive AC” to “We need to use up our credit, keep that AC running”. It was quite a shift.
Without running AC, my typical monthly electrical consumption is around 1,000 – 1,200 kwh. This may have resulted in a $250-$300 monthly bill. Not great, but not bad for a larger two story home with a pool. I could live with that. This July, which was hotter than normal and I ran my AC a lot! My total usage was 2,500 kwh. I can’t even imagine what my electrical bill would have been. My rough calculation says something north of $800. An $800 electric bill would have sent me through the roof. After that I would probably never run the A/C again and would have been yelling at everybody in the house for not turning off every light as they leave the room. Not a fun person to be around. Instead this July’s electricity usage was free as a result of springtime solar overproduction.
This leads me to two lesser points. Conservation and keeping your panels clean. Conservation has become easier as electronics have become more efficient. My old computer used to draw 150 watts. My new computer draws 60 watts. My old TV used to draw 500 watts. My new TV draws less than 100 watts. The biggest improvement, LED light bulbs. An LED light bulb used to cost north of $50. Now they are less than $10. Swapping my light bulbs with LED’s made a noticeable improvement, bringing my pre solar monthly consumption from around 1,400 kwh down to about 1,100 kwh. This saved about $75 per month.
Finally, clean your solar panels at least every 60 days when there is no rain. This last week I cleaned my panels for the first time. They were installed in December of 2018, so there was 11 months of dirt. After cleaning my panels my production immediately increased by 14%. This amount would translate into around $500 annually. A significant improvement.
They say a “happy wife is a happy life”. They also say that a “Penny saved is a penny earned”. Therein lies my dilemma, how to be ecologically and economically responsible and yet keep my wife happy. The problem was air conditioning’s massive expense. An oversize solar system was the solution.