The First Month on Solar

Well, we’ve had our Tesla Solar Roof system operational for a month now! It simultaneously feels like it hasn’t been that long and feels like it’s been forever.

Since the month in question has been most of September, we’ve had a combination of hot days, really hot days, and a few nice days toward the end of the month. Of course, the bearing that has on our solar situation is that hot days mean running the air conditioner which as it turns out is a huge electricity hog!

Originally when writing this post I included a picture of our electricity usage graph on a nice day versus a hot day with the A/C running; that devolved into a giant explanation of how to read the graph which I carved out into a separate post.

That being said, I have good news to report regarding our electric bill! The utility company just sent us the first bill that includes a portion of the time we had our solar system in operation. Specifically, the billing cycle goes from August 8 to September 10; we turned on our solar system the night of August 28 so the last 10 days of the 33-day billing period were affected by our solar power generation. I compared this bill to the bill for this same calendar period last year and the difference was pretty drastic!

Yes, you read that right — even with only part of the month spent on solar power, our electricity bill is less than half of what it was for the same period last year! Now granted, there’s no guarantee our electricity needs for the same month in two different years is going to be the same — we might have just used half as much electricity to run our house this time around — but given that the main energy draw is the A/C let’s compare the temperatures to last year. The graphs below are from AccuWeather.com — the thin orange line is the historical average high temperature for each day; you can see how it was generally on-track with that line in 2018 and generally above it in 2019. So even though we used the A/C more this year our bill was halved just by spending 10 days of the month on solar!

Can’t wait to see the next bill, where the whole cycle will be on solar! (How often do you hear somebody say they can’t wait to get their electric bill?)

Billing aside, how does it feel? Gotta say, it feels pretty nice! One one hand it doesn’t make a tangible difference in your daily life the same way having a new car or something would, but similar to how stress at work causes you to feel stressed at home it makes a continuous intangible difference. Even if I’m at work, if I look out the window and see the sun is shining brightly I think “Just imagine all the solar power my home is creating right now!” The app reinforces that; I pull out my phone every so often just to see how the energy picture looks for that day.

I’ll post again with more thoughts later, and will post our October-November bill once we get it!