We just passed the one year anniversary of our solar power system going live. How do things look after a full year? Pretty good.
First some numbers, then let’s talk about how we got there.
When A&R Solar installed our system, they estimated it would produce 5,200 kWh of electricity per year. Based on past usage, that should have offset 39% of our consumption.
When we went forward with the installation, we also set ourselves the goal of reducing our ridiculous electrical use as much as possible, hoping that we could even live entirely within what we produced.
Overall, we did okay. Over a full year, we ended up producing enough electricity to offset 74% of our consumption, about twice what was forecast.
Some of that came from cutting our consumption and some from our system producing better than 25% more electricity than estimated.
We had a clear, warm summer in 2014 and that helped production. Some calculations with the data at the UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences show that for the twelve months I’m looking at, we got about 8% more insolation than usual.
Conservative bidding and an awesome installation job from our friends at A&R Solar also helped. One of the reasons we selected A&R was that they bid conservatively and avoided giving us pie-in-the-sky production figures (something we liked about them).
Now as for our part, I feel pretty good about a 33% reduction in our electricity consumption, yet I know we can do better. 2014-2015 was an outlier year in many ways because of the recipe testing for the book.
So, what worked? What didn’t? What did we learn and can we do better over the next year?
What worked
- Hand-washing dishes when possible (each dishwasher load uses about 1 kWh)
- Avoiding our electric clothes dryer when possible (each load uses about 3 kWh)
- Opting for “quick wash” cycles doing laundry or when we did run the dishwasher (this can reduce the electricity consumed by a load anywhere from 25-50% plus often save on water.
- Being careful about “keep warm” options on the rice cooker and coffee pot and crock pot.
- Not doing stupid things like brewing a pot of coffee and forgetting about it until the next morning or microwaving some leftovers and never eating them.
- Replacing our grow-lights with more energy efficient versions and being more aggressive about getting plants outside when they are ready.
- Replacing almost all of our interior lights with LEDs.
- Planning ahead so we can defrost goods in the fridge rather than firing up the microwave.
- Consolidating our two deep freezes into just one.
- Better management of our central heat (it is gas, but the fan still consumes several hundred Watts) in the morning, letting the house warm up naturally during spring and fall mornings rather even though it is a little chilly until the sun comes up.
- In general, being more conscious of our non-critical electrical loads like computers, TVs, stereos, and turning them off when not in use.
What was hard
- While recipe testing for the book, lots of dishwasher and dryer discipline went by the wayside. When you’re cooking twelve things in one day, you’ll take all of the mechanical support you can get!
- Maintaining routines that make it possible to do things like line drying laundry – it just isn’t possible to do five loads to dig out of a backlog of dirty clothes without running the dryer.
- Lights can still be a major consumer, especially in the locations we haven’t yet upgraded to LEDs. These tend to be closets and our guest room and the like – rarely used rooms but also rooms it is easy to forget you’ve left a light on in.
- Bored kids during winter break make for a lot of movies, lights left on, batches of cookies, and pots of coffee…
- Sometimes you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do…firing up a 300 Watt heat lamp to help brood ducklings might be a few kWh per day, but such is the price for…well…ducklings.
Trying To Do Better
There’s still lots of room for us to home in on electrical loads we don’t need. I’ve just gotten my own Kill-A-Watt (which we’ve used before to track some power hungry demons) so we can keep zeroing in on zombie loads and hidden consumers.
We’ve gone through another round of swapping out our few remaining incandescent bulbs for LEDs as the cost of this technology keeps dropping.
We’re still sorting out some of the overall conservation/cost impact of some of our choices, too. Just how much more water and gas do we use by hand-washing dishes? It’s all well and good to cut down on electrical use, but what if doing so increases natural gas use? Energy is a complex trade-space and we’re still figuring it out.
Our very lifestyle imposes some energy demands we’re still working on. Both Erica and I work primarily from home, so it’s very unusual for the whole family to walk out the front door at 8 am and return at 6 pm. Similarly, things like grow lights, brooder lights, a deep-freeze, and a pump for the pond filter all require power. We could further reduce our electrical consumption without these things, but only at the cost of other things we value.
Tradeoffs. Always tradeoffs.
In general, almost all of this energy conservation stuff comes down to being mindful and having your routines together.
If life is a scattershot mess, then you’re going to forget that bowl of chili in the microwave, need to run the dryer at 6am because you’ve no clean work shirts, break down and run the dishwasher because the sink is piled high with dinner plates.
The latter half of 2014 was a challenge in this regard. I’ve already plead the excuse of recipe testing, and you can see how dramatically that spiked our energy use when you look at the January “lull” in the chart below. That represents time when Erica wasn’t actively testing for the book.
Our goal this year is to move further towards that goal of living entirely within the electricity we produce.
Overall, going solar has been a great experience. These sunny days are helping us “pay off” the electricity we tapped off the grid over the grey months of fall and winter and soon we’ll be putting some in the bank against against this winter. If you’re in the Seattle area and are considering “going solar” we heartily recommend A&R Solar – and if you tell them you came from Northwest Edible Life, we’ve arranged for you to get a discount of up to $500 on an installed system.
1
Do you pay for your water (incoming and/or wastewater fees)? do you use mostly gas or electricity? i.e. if I was trying to save electricity, I would just cook with gas.
Has concentrating on saving electricity increased consumption in other areas?
Thanks!
We do pay usage fees for both water and gas (our water heat is gas). In general it is more cost-effective for us (can’t promise that’s true for everyone’s rate structure, though) to use gas heat, so one of the things we’ve tried to do is, like you suggest, shift things in that direction. It is tough to say if we’ve actually increased consumption in other areas…we’ve got this awesome super-granular ability to track our electricity use but water and gas are much more general…and confounded by things like having to water the garden, etc.
Do you pay for your water (incoming and/or waste water fees)? do you use mostly gas or electricity? i.e. if I was trying to save electricity, I would just cook with gas.
Has concentrating on saving electricity increased consumption in other areas?
Thanks!
I’m excited to hear about your solar experiences, we are thinking about going solar sometime in the next few years.
Wanted to throw out a suggestion for brooding chicks/ducklings: Brinsea Ecoglow brooder. Only uses ~18 watts electricity and no fire risk like a heat lamp. My chicks love it. 🙂 kind of spendy up front, but between electricity savings and fire hazard peace of mind, worth it.
When I was in 8th grade I did a little survey study of power use in typical households and how much power those zombie suckers use. (With a lot, lot, lot of help from my parents) I found that things that run on standby power (really anything that requires a remote-control or had an inbuilt timer/clock function, it was 2000 so think VCR, TV, giant CRT computer monitors people didn’t turn off) could consume up to 22% of your household power budget. Of course, lots of those things you can’t just turn off — you might need the clock function on your VCR to turn on and start recording late-night episodes of Murder She Wrote, for example — but other things could be turned off completely overnight or when nobody was in the house. Anyway, it was basically an interesting exploration into how much power we waste by being lazy and not turning off appliances all the way, and my family enacted some easy power-saving strategies like putting all of those appliances in one room on a single surge protector that we could just turn off at night and turn back on when we needed it. It would be interesting to see a rundown of how appliances that run on standby power use energy these days, considering that we tend to have more remote-controlled appliances but things have (I think?) become more energy-efficient.
VCR never included, because Murder She Wrote.
Thank god we don’t have any CRTs in the house anymore: “Hey let’s leave this monitor on 24 hours a day so we can watch animated fish swim on the screen!” That’s one of the reasons I’m excited to get going with my own Kill-A-Watt meter (vs renting it from the library)…plugging it in to some of those “occasional” loads and letting it sit for a week to see how the aggregate really does add up. I know some of our loads like fiber modem and wifi aren’t trivial but they will probably be our equivalent to Murder She Wrote…
Oh, and way to go being ahead of the times and starting to think about this stuff back in the days of Murder She Wrote, VCRs, and CRTs!
Ok first of this is awesome and inspiring. While Solar panels are not in the budget, turning off the coffee a maker definitely is! One tiny tidbit, I think it should be “8% more solar irradiance” not irradiation. Irradiance is the flux of radiant energy per unit area, irradiation is the act of irradiation – like what they do to sterilize things in industrial settings. (Sorry, picky scientist!)
Thank you, glad you enjoyed! Totally ashamed about “irridiation” though, as an English major who worked in a high energy physics lab for three years, I should know better! Thank you for the catch, I fixed it. Actually the term I should have used was “insolation” – solar irradiance integrated over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation).
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been really curious about how solar performs in the winter here, and if the kwh that the solar companies claim really works out.
Most of the companies that are still around seem to be playing a pretty straight game. Most offer some sort of “production guarantee” in case you don’t meet the expected numbers. We actually had two different companies bid virtually identical systems – A&R had the lower numbers in a way that seemed to speak of comfortingly conservative engineering. Perhaps ironically, it was actually one of the reasons we went with them.
We (independently) went with A&R as well. Our installation is scheduled for the end of July (after the metal roof is installed over the existing torch down.)
I believe it’s supposed to cover ~89% of our usage. I’ll be interested to see how that shakes out.
LOL! Seriously! I thought my husband was the only one who microwaved leftovers only for me to find them still in the microwave in the morning. Fess up…Erica or homebrew?
Barb
Well the one that gets me is actually half-finished cups of coffee that I forget in various corners of the house and garden. Then I’ll collect them into one cup of tepid coffee, reheat it, and go wandering off somewhere only to forget it half consumed somewhere…
The smart thing would be to use thermal mugs, of course (Erica often does in winter), but I just can’t bring myself to give up that full-body experience of inhaling the warm steam and aroma…
Would one of these work? I’ve never used them but it seems to have the warm steam / aroma thing still going for it.
http://www.amazon.com/Epar%C3%A9-Double-Wall-Insulated-12-ounce-Glass/dp/B00GG0SMLM/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1434488716&sr=8-18-spons&keywords=thermal+mug
Though I also noticed it’s not for use with metal utensils. …like a spoon??
That’s gorgeous. And I have a total crush on borosilicate glass. But I know with depressing certainty that I’d break the thing within a month. 🙁
So glad to see all the nitty-gritty details! I think you’re doing amazingly well on your energy use considering you are a 4 person household that, as you say, really lives in your productive home (you’re not outsourcing your energy use to workplaces, etc). As a comparison, we only have electricity as our utility (so electric hot water and heat), we use our woodstove exclusively for heat, and for a 2 person household (productive homestead, but outside workplaces), our consumption is about 520kwhrs/mo to your 720 ish. Pretty impressive!
I’m curious about the draw of the grow lights, as this is something I wrestle with. I start all my seedlings in our unheated greenhouse after Feb 2nd on heat mats, but without grow lights. The greenhouse isn’t ideally situated, and no question that I get some legginess in the seedlings, but I find that once planted out, the veggies grow like stink and don’t seem set back. I know that with lights I could start things indoors in January, and get a jump on the season, but I balance that with overwintering veggies and don’t feel the gap, really. We just adjust our diets a little. Of course, the trade-off to not having lettuce in March is buying a little more at the grocery store, or storing a little more in the freezer, both of which have energy consequences. But I don’t feel like we could run grow lights off a solar panel–am I wrong?
Thanks for your thoughts! We’re on Vancouver Island, so a little north but perhaps a little sunnier than you in Seattle.
Our new T5 grow lights use something like 450 Watts for each four foot panel (we’ve got two) if all the lamps are on. That’s almost 11kWh per day if they’re on a twelve hour duty cycle. If you wanted to drop the power even further, the way to go is with LED grow lights…I’ve looked at that technology a few times and it remains financially daunting. Let’s just say it only makes sense if you are growing a certain high cash value crop with a long history of hybridization for growing indoors under artificial light…
This year we were more aggressive about moving the seedlings outside. We hooked a heater mat up (that is just about 100 Watts, I think) to keep them warm but got to cut the lights off sooner. The fact that it was a warm spring certainly helped too.
The thing with a grid-tie solar setup like we have, though, is that you’re still “connected” and so there’s no problem running the grow lights in the middle of pitch black January. Our “Solar FAQ” post explains how that works in a little more detail: http://nwedible.com/solar-in-seattle/
I’m curious: do you have any thoughts on the batteries that Tesla announced? Are they at all practical for a home system? Or still too spendy to make an off-grid system doable here?
I haven’t looked at the Tesla Power Wall (I think that’s what it is called) much. I LOVE the idea of an affordable, maintainable, reasonable sized, low maintenance battery system as a short-term backup. But I think I’m in a bit of a wait-and-see mode with how it ends up playing with grid-tied solar power systems.
I’ve had my array for almost two years and have never looked back. If I purchase a new property, one of the key criteria will be the ability to put up a large array.
I’ve taken a slightly different attitude and gone more with a set-it-and-forget-it approach. I think of it as sustainable energy meant to be enjoyed…and love the AC on my heat pump! That said, I’m a household of one, not four, so that makes a big difference.
I loved how thoughtful this post was, and how you could articulate the ways in which your energy consumption went up or down. The graph with the box of explanations was perfect. But you get 100,000 Internet Bucks for “Winter is Coming.”
This is a wonderful analysis! Someday I’d like to have solar (our state has no incentives and we’re moving soon anyway), but I did a little running around with a Kill-a-watt unit and decided that our treadmill (a surprising zombie) was perfectly capable of holding up laundry at zero kilowatts/hr. Your idea of short washing cycles (even our dishwasher has this) is something we can add on right away.
I got a quote from A&R back in the spring when we first bought our house. A lot of the numbers were similar to yours. My main question is how long will it take for the panels to pay for themselves? If you got the energy loans available from around the area, you may pay off that loan in 5.5 years (if I rembmer corectly that’s what your plan said), but how much would you actually be paying out of pocket over that 5.5 years, and how long will it take for the electricity produced to pay for those out of pocket costs and actually start generating “revenue”?
Our quote was 4.6 years for the loan ($23k) to be paid off. But during those 4.6 years which includes all of the incentives and tax breaks we’d still be paying $9,660 ($175/mo for 4.6yrs). They quoted us that 4.6 yrs if we were using 9,000 kwh/yr, but we’ll probably use closer to 6,000 kwh/yr, so we would really be done faster than 4.6 years.
This is a very interesting article. Thank you so much for all that insight on how to reduce electricity consumption and how solar pushes you to reduce your consumption.