Warning: You may become obsessed with your electricity usage!
I read somewhere that after one adds solar panels to their property, they start using more electricity. I guess the idea is that the electricity is kind of “free” after the sunk costs of the panels, so you worry about the electric bill less.
I’ve found the opposite and this has been confirmed by a friend of mine who has had solar panels about a year or two before mine were switched on.
He says that he became even more vigilant about energy usage after having his panels installed. He and his wife work at home and run four mini splits in the house. He tries to use them as much as he can for cooling and heating on the shoulder season to maximize his carbon footprint reduction.
Right now he gets about six electric bill-free months and is always trying different ways to reduce his energy use. One thing he recommended was a Sense energy monitor.
Sense uses artificial intelligence to guess which appliances are turning on when and how much energy they are using. So for example, when the system is learning your household and you turn on a toaster, it figures out why kind of appliance just went on by it’s signature energy use. Toasters have a certain power draw and a certain time they typically run. Sense uses its database to determine that, yes indeed a toaster just powered up.
Sense can be used to track down phantom power draws like that attic light that always gets left on or how much energy your TV is using when it is supposed to be off but is actually still one waiting for you to push the remote.
Here’s what uses the most energy in your home:
- Cooling and heating: 47% of energy use
- Water heater: 14% of energy use
- Washer and dryer: 13% of energy use
- Lighting: 12% of energy use
- Refrigerator: 4% of energy use
- Electric oven: 3-4% of energy use
- TV, DVD, cable box: 3% of energy use
- Dishwasher: 2% of energy use
- Computer: 1% of energy use
Anything with a heating element is going to use a lot of power – toaster, hair dryer, curling iron, electric stove etc.
LED Light Bulbs
This one is kind of obvious. I replaced every energy-wasting old-fashioned “Edison” incandescent light bulb in our house when we first moved in.
The power savings is like 10x between the old technology bulbs and modern LED bulbs.
Dryer
On the first really sunny day after installing my solar panels, I noticed one panel was shutting down. At first I thought it was a bad solar panel or a loose wire. But then I looked around online and found out that it was most likely shutting down because I was producing too much electricity.
The grid can only accept so much electricity so the system is designed to turn off a panel or too if it reaches a certain point.
From my perspective, that’s a waste! The electricity from the panel is not charging the already full battery, not going to the grid and not being used in the house.
The only solution was to use it for something. Then I thought of the clothes dryer. One of the biggest energy hogs in any household, so I did a load of laundry. When I flipped on the clothes dryer I couldn’t believe how much power it was drawing — all of the peak solar panel electricity and then it even started siphoning off of the battery and some from the grid.
I shut it off and hung the clothes on the line. But then it got me thinking, there must be a more efficient clothes dryer and I found heat pump clothes dryers.
Heat pump dryers use half the energy as a conventional dryer and don’t need a vent. They draw heat from the laundry room. Perfect for us as our utility room is always roasting.
Another great feature is the before-mentioned lack of a vent. No need to drill a big four-inch hole to the outside from our laundry room and then blow hot air out it. The heat pump dryer draws out the moisture and then vents dry air into the room. No more pumping warm air out of the house!
Using Timers
Turning off zombie or phantom electrics that use electricity even when they are “off”, can be accomplished with power strips with an off button. But one might forget to turn them on and off.
Timers might be another way to turn off entertainment centers and other appliances that use electricity when seemingly off. Why not set a timer to turn them off in the middle of the night?