--scene takes place at aisle 41 bay 10--
excuse me sir would you like more info on our solar panels
no
maybe we can help you plan for your future upgrades. how old is your house
1991 but no
can we get your information to send you some stuff
no
how long do you plan on living in your house
dude im here for thread sealant gtfo

Lol! Hell if you would have been interested in solar power he still wouldn't have known nothing he would have just read out of a pamphlet!!

LOL - I sometimes go twice per week and the same dude keeps asking me.

Me: dude you asked me already last week and the week before and even the week before and before that too and each and every time I told you the same: our electricity bill is $25 per month - so thank you, but I don't want to invest multiple thousands in solar so I can save $25 per month - thank you.

-----------------------------------------

Roof Solar is only good if you have an OCD washing habbit or some fancy expensive electricity guzzler Tesla in your Republic Kalifornia garage, that you charge during the day when you are working night shifts.
FYI Tesla S takes 100Kwh charge to fill up to go a manufacturer claimed 350 miles (which tested more like 250-300 miles, but never mind). Residential 100Kwh in California is about $35. So $35 to go 250-300 miles - thank you, but no thank you - TBI™ can almost do that, with some cheap gas and if in a good mood.

I’ve thought about doing some solar stuff,our bill can be as high as $700 during the winter sometimes (house and home shop).
It’s really time to do another energy audit though and take care of some maintenance.

home despot is ur place then ha

I’m more of a “piece it together yourself for cheaper but end up spending twice as much in the end” kind of guy though.
Can’t pay retail in that scenario or i’d spend 3x as much.

playtoy_18 wrote:

I’ve thought about doing some solar stuff,our bill can be as high as $700 during the winter sometimes (house and home shop).
It’s really time to do another energy audit though and take care of some maintenance.

A few thoughts on this:

You can likely have a separate meter installed by an electrician, or if you think you can do it yourself... These guys sell submeters that you can install on the wiring incoming from your house at your shop's panel, but I've never used them before so I have no idea if they sell decent stuff or trash. The wiring for the panel would pass through this guy, and it'll give you the shop's power usage. Subtract that from the house bill and you'll know how much the house uses.

I know I've been in your house before but it's been too many years so I don't remember if you have cathedral ceilings. If you do, there's a huge part of the problem. It can be as much as 10 degrees hotter in the ceiling area, so you're paying to heat a 2 story house while only living in 1 story with a cathedral ceiling. Ceiling fans can help push the heat down, but you're still having to heat all that area.

LED bulbs save quite a bit over CFLs, and tons over incandescent. And, the 3000Kis bulbs put out the same yellow white light that the incandescent bulbs do.

Adding insulation will help a lot. I added a foot to my last house, and it cut about 100 a month off my utilities while making the house more comfortable. The insulation ran me 800 bucks for blown cellulose but that was a number of years ago.

If you have electric hot water, you may have crud or corrosion around the elements. If so, then the heater has to expend more energy to get heat to the water. Flushing the tank and replacing the elements might help. For that matter, a yearly tank flush will both help your tank perform better and help it last longer. Easy enough to do, just drain the tank a couple of times.

A heat pump will save you money on a monthly basis too. My dad's house is about 1800 sq ft over in Van Buren, and he likes it warm in winter and cold in summer. His total bill is about 100 a month year round, total electric house. The bad, he has to replace the heat pump about once every 10 years or so. They always run.

Being in the country, sort of, no idea if you have access to gas or not. If not, going propane might help out. It's more efficient to use fire to heat than resistance. We live close enough together that my tank supplier might be yours as well, my thousand gallon propane tank ran me about 1000 bucks delivered and installed about 3 years ago. Went with 1000 gallons because it should be enough to carry me through an entire year, which is important because propane is damned expensive when you have to fill the tank in December or January but a lot cheaper about this time of year. Not to mention, having propane in the winter is great when you have backup heaters and a power outage.

Lastly, your offspring as I recall should be in the teens by now. My kids had a bad habit of standing in front of the fridge for 10-15 minutes trying to decide what to eat, leaving lights on all hours of the day and night, taking hour long showers, ect. Having the kids move out saved me more on my utilities than anything else.

Hope some of this helps.

We usually have a pretty good idea of house versus shop,I wanted seperate service but code enforcement wouldn’t let me unless I changed zoning pretty much. Some stupid rule about one meter per property,I badgered them about the shop being a seperately deeded property altogether but the “committee” didn’t care.
I don’t care enough really to go to the expense of buying meter myself just for logging.
Yeah,we’ve got cathedral ceilings and they are a power suck for sure,hate them.
We switched to CFL’s years back,just now starting to change over to LED. The wife wouldn’t let me before because she hates cool white.
I’ve bought a few LED retrofit lights to put in shop where i’ve had a couple tubes blow out as well. Buddy opened a commercial shop the size of mine and his electric hasn’t ran over $50 a month yet. I have more machines but he works his 8am-5pm+ 5-6 days a week (he has LED as well).
Hot water tank is new last year I think (one of the things I want to take solar).
I do need to recaulk the windows,they are getting pretty bad.
We are all electric,though my shop uses wood for heat (going central hvac soon). I want to get propane in for emergencies but we need a generator regardless in emergencies so redundent but not really.
The kids defintely suck some juice,but it’s with electronics lol.
Ben is on the laptop all day and Brittany has two tablets going at any one time usually with music.
Also the Tv tends to run 24/7 in the living room,at any particular time of day or night at least one of us is awake so it rarely goes off.
We could prob save an easy hundo just reigning in some habits i’m sure.

Yup. On the LED bulbs, you can get anything from 3K to 5K, and 5K is a bluish white light. So, any color she wants, pretty much, you can get.

We thought about a generator as well, but they suck down tons of fuel when they're running. One large enough to run the entire house would drain our tank in about a week and a half. A smaller generator that would run the fridge, deep freeze and living room would likely last 20 days or so before I'd need a fill and if we do get one this is how we'd do it. 1000 gallon tanks only hold 800 gallons, to allow for expansion, and you have to get a refill by 20 percent or you will start having problems. We decided to just use backup heaters to keep the house warm, along with a propane water heater and a propane stove so in the event of a power failure, we really don't have a whole lot we would need power for.

If you want solar water, these folks seem to have it knocked.

playtoy_18 wrote:

We are all electric,though my shop uses wood for heat (going central hvac soon). I want to get propane in for emergencies but we need a generator regardless in emergencies so redundant but not really.

If you are heating with electricity than I think THAT is it right there. Before we bought our house we lived in a small apartment. Because of heating our electricity was over $100 in the winter (southern California winter!). Now in our house we have gas heating furnace. Gas bill is around $60 in the same southern California winter and that $60 generously heats the whole house instead of just a tiny apartment as the $100 worth of electricity did before. So gas heating seems to be substantially cheaper than electricity at least in our area prices. In the apartment we were in Tier 3 (of Tier 1-4) during those winter months with residential Tier 3 prices going fir $0.35. I understand that depending of the availability of natural gas infrastructure in your area and your furnace and heating type it might be difficult to convert to gas.