No Power? No Problem!
Video Transcript
Back in 2014, I bought a 2015 Nissan Leaf. I wanted to know more about this electric movement and things like that. And the best way for me to know something is to know firsthand. From there, kind of stepped into a few other things around the house, tools and things like that, running on batteries, liked the idea, felt like there was something we could do at the home. I started looking into that more and more that led me down this path. I came to him with a little bit of a unique situation, wanting to do panels and then needing some help with battery installing and things like that. We worked out something along the way that worked for both them and mine, but goodness, if you saw they installed the batteries down there, those guys did an awesome job. It’s laid out just the way I wanted it. They were able to make all those things happen and and at the end of the day would highly recommend them to anybody looking for solar install.
I was planning to do just solar install at the time and the more I started to understand what was happening in the relationship with Georgia Power and excess power and where that goes and kind of how those dollars work. It started to make more sense to try and keep that excess power on the property. Batteries seemed to be the best obvious choice for that. And at that point, then it was figuring out how many we wanted to put in with that. Started small, added a little to it, got a little bit more information, added a little bit more to that. Well, and I’ve been very happy with where we are right now. Better solar tomorrow. I came to know them through looking for a certified in phase installer. I knew I was going with in phase equipment. We’ve got in phase micro inverters out there and wanted to stay in the whole ecosystem.
Better Solar Tomorrow was on that list. I wound up calling the owner explaining my situation. It wasn’t mainstream for what they do, but he and I built an understanding around that, and we were able to find a solution that worked for him, the company, and myself as well, and it was absolutely great. So we have a whole home backup system here, so the entire house is, I’m gonna say, protected if you will, with these batteries. Inface has a nice feature as a part of their app and their ecosystem. If the National Weather Service issues an alert for our. They’ll switch us to if I turn it on to a full backup mode where today I run on self-consumption they’ll automatically temporarily switch to a full backup mode and what that means is they’ll take the batteries up to 100%. So if we do lose power, we’ve got the full potential. What I found with the 40 kilowatt hours, we have sufficient to carry us for a long time, and that’s reassuring.
We consume in March last year about 1100 kilowatt hours. This March we consumed just over $200. In addition, we gave just over 600 kilowatt hours back to Georgia Power. Our bill for the energy consumption we had for March was $3.50. It was awesome. One evening was just kind of kicking back talking to my wife and said, you know, think about this for a minute. We’ve got solar panels outside, no moving parts, batteries in the basement, no moving parts, no greenhouse gas emissions, just everything kind of works. We’ve got power to the house from all this, the majority of the time, a little bit from the grid. But how cool is that? Just things sitting there that are gonna last many, many, many years, able to provide power to the house for all that time.