I paid ~$800 for 1.2kW of solar panels on my van in 2023. The 600Ah of LFP was an additional $1,700. I’ve not paid a power bill in 2.5 years. How anyone could choose to not go solar baffles me. I was paying $3/kWh through the city-owned utility. Nominally, it was somewhere around 15 cents, but after all the fees that Austin charges, despite using only 20kWh/month, my bill was $60 at minimum.
The city has now raised rates five times since I went off-grid, so a straight $60 times 30 months undersells the ROI. It would now be $75-80, and $80 times 30 months means I’ll have broken even by May.
Less than three years, and when the power goes out in town, I’m unaware of it unless I run into a complaint on Reddit.
According to the US EIA as of 2022, the average annual amount of electricity sold to a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,791 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or an average of about 899 kWh per month.
But no, the reason is that I live in a decently sized old house in a cold area. We’ve dual zone climate control and I’m not sure either heat pump stopped running the whole month. I do run some servers but that’s true year round and most months my power bill is in various parts of triple digits.
I paid ~$800 for 1.2kW of solar panels on my van in 2023. The 600Ah of LFP was an additional $1,700. I’ve not paid a power bill in 2.5 years. How anyone could choose to not go solar baffles me. I was paying $3/kWh through the city-owned utility. Nominally, it was somewhere around 15 cents, but after all the fees that Austin charges, despite using only 20kWh/month, my bill was $60 at minimum.
The city has now raised rates five times since I went off-grid, so a straight $60 times 30 months undersells the ROI. It would now be $75-80, and $80 times 30 months means I’ll have broken even by May.
Less than three years, and when the power goes out in town, I’m unaware of it unless I run into a complaint on Reddit.
Uh, that’s really a lot.
You think using 2.2% of that is excessive?
… My power bill for February was $1900 …
Holy crap. Do you live in a bitcoin server farm? Thats insane.
I don’t disagree that it was insane!
But no, the reason is that I live in a decently sized old house in a cold area. We’ve dual zone climate control and I’m not sure either heat pump stopped running the whole month. I do run some servers but that’s true year round and most months my power bill is in various parts of triple digits.
that is an absurdly high price for energy. I pay on average between 20 and 30 euro cent per kwh