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It has been a very long haul since we took the plunge last June and paid for our solar equipment, manufactured in China, to be transported across the US border to our home in Kaslo, BC. Sometime on December 5, electricity from six of the eight solar panels that are now hooked up to our batteries, began feeding energy to our fridge, and to some of the circuits in our house.
From June 18 to August 18, 61 days, we sold FortisBC 341 kWh of electricty and purchased 351, for a net purchase of 10 kWh.
While our bill including taxes was $32.85, the actual amount spent on purchasing those 10 kWh was 95 cents.
That’s right, for nearly two months this summer we spent $30.33 to be hooked up to the grid, $1.57 in sales taxes and 95 cents on electricity.
Net consumption off the grid amounts to .16 kWh per day.
Our next project is to figure out how much electricity were are actually consuming per day as a household, as that taken from the grid, 351 kWh,
amounts to 5.75 kWh, but that does not include what we used from our own solar system as well.
We have a computer program wired in to our inverter that reads daily production, but have not yet fully determined how it works.
Finally we are looking forward to seeing what our next bill brings around October 18th.
The Cost
This experiment is not for the faint hearted financially, but the costs below are better than the $70,000 we were originally quoted a decade ago:
Solar Equipment $11,651.1
Canadian Tax $583.00
Electrician $4,461.78
Building and Equipment Supplies $2,791.02
Solar Equipment Shed Labour $1,245
Trenching $929.25
Total = $21,661.15
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This is an update to the Going Solar article featured in our March/April 2015 edition. Going Solar can be found HERE
