Life with solar after a year.

[pj.mask]

The main factor for solar is electricity price. Here in the sunny sky south - I’d love to get it but a got a bad contract rate due to electric renewal timing. 8.7cents/kWh. Coming off a 7.5cent/kWh

I can’t find any reasonable payout time. Lots of areas have high priced electric due to demand (high or low).

There is a lot of appeal to not having to rely on the grid.

 

[ERD50]

Sorry for the late reply. We have tiered pricing here, with the first tier up to ~400KWh at .23 per KWh, 2nd tier is up to ~700 KWh at .41 per KWh and 3rd tier is anything above that at .48 per KWh. Our consumption for a family of 4 is around 500 KWh per month. If we consumed significantly more, our costs per KWh would be higher, and the payback period shorter. Last time I looked at installing solar, the payback was over 12 years, which was longer than I wanted.

If we ever got an electric vehicle, that might make the finances of it more appealing for us.

OK, thanks. I see where the tiered pricing fits in now.

-ERD50

 

[Offgrid Organic Farmer]

The main factor for solar is electricity price. Here in the sunny sky south - I’d love to get it but a got a bad contract rate due to electric renewal timing. 8.7cents/kWh. Coming off a 7.5cent/kWh

I can’t find any reasonable payout time. Lots of areas have high priced electric due to demand (high or low).

There is a lot of appeal to not having to rely on the grid.

In my area with us the biggest factor was watching how much our neighbors spend on generator fuel. If you have to run your generator for a week every month, by the end of the year you will have spent a great deal on fuel.

My wife did not want to be so reliant on petroleum just to power our house.

Solar power is always going to be more expensive than grid power.

But with a large enough battery-bank a solar system can power your home every day all year round, which obviously the power grid can never do. In our town the grid can not provide power for a single month, not once in fifteen years [so far].

 

[tb001]

Sorry for the late reply. We have tiered pricing here, with the first tier up to ~400KWh at .23 per KWh, 2nd tier is up to ~700 KWh at .41 per KWh and 3rd tier is anything above that at .48 per KWh. Our consumption for a family of 4 is around 500 KWh per month. If we consumed significantly more, our costs per KWh would be higher, and the payback period shorter. Last time I looked at installing solar, the payback was over 12 years, which was longer than I wanted.

If we ever got an electric vehicle, that might make the finances of it more appealing for us.

Yes. In SoCA if you have a large house, need AC and have a pool pump running it starts to make sense fast when most of your energy is in the higher tiers. Our energy prices have gone up considerably over the last 5 yrs as well. One of the ‘gotchas’ is that the utility companies are charging more for evening power, so unless you have a battery, those evening hours can hurt the return.