Hi my name is Marquez Brownlee and I have not paid for electricity in a year I have a bunch of electrical appliances, computers, game console, TVs air conditioning and I drive an electric car to and from work every single day and charge it home Zero dollar bill. So I know I had a lot of questions about how this stuff worked, how much it cost, how much it generated a whole bunch of that stuff before I got started and now I finally have all the answers. Let's get into it. so: I have had solar panels on my roof at home for the past 12 months now and I waited this long specifically because now I've seen all Four Seasons and I've observed a wide variety of performance and I've run all the numbers and I have a lot of thoughts about them so I want to share them.

So first of all, for those familiar, there are a lot of options for solar systems at home. I Like that they're called solar systems too. but there are a lot of different companies who make solar systems to power all the electrical needs of a home, including an electric car. So I know I wanted to do this for a while since the whole point for me was to be able to drive electric for the foreseeable future and actually be able to know that the energy is coming from a sustainable Source the Sun But first, it's actually important to understand that a big part a big part of this solar system is batteries as well.

So a normal house is connected to the electrical grid and whenever something in the house, whether it's a light bulb or a computer or an appliance, calls for electricity, it pulls from the grid and and Spins up a meter on the side of the house that tallies how much you've pulled. Then at the end of the month, you get billed for how much electricity you've used. Great! Now if you just add solar panels to this house, when the sun shines during the day on those tiles, it can use that electricity to directly power things in the house. Now of course, if it's cloudy, or if you have a bunch of stuff on all at once and the demand is more than the power from the Sun is providing, then it'll pull the rest of what it needs from the grid and spin the meter as well.

But most importantly, as soon as the sun goes down, the electricity generated goes to zero and it just so happens that most people come home from work as the sun is going down and that's when they turn on all the lights and do the laundry and charge the car. Etc So you're still going to be pulling from the grid for most stuff. Now that's actually fine for most people, because if the goal, which a lot of people's goal is, is to have a zero dollar electricity bill, then this can actually be accomplished because the power company will hopefully depending on where you live, but ideally be running something called net metering. So what this means is when the Sun Shines on the roof and excess electricity is being generated because nobody's home, the house actually spins the electrical meter backwards as it sends extra electricity back to the grid.

Then when the Sun goes down and you get home and use a bunch of electricity from the grid, the meter spins back forwards and so ideally the total usage is zero Net zero. That's how you end up with the zero dollar electricity bill, which is super cool. But what if you want to sort of graduate to the next level of sustainability? What if you want to be completely independent of the grid totally Off the Grid. Well, that's when batteries come in, so add battery storage to this system.

and now the loop is complete. So when the sun shines during the day and you're not home, it fills up the batteries effectively storing Sunshine energy. And then when you get home and the sun goes down, you can keep using that extra solar energy that you stored with all the electrical needs that you have until the next morning when the sun comes out again and starts filling up those batteries again. So with a system like this, you can theoretically not just have a zero dollar power bill, but never actually pull from the Grid at all.

You're completely self-sustainable You never have to worry about a power outage ever again. You won't even know if a power outage happens. That is the Off the Grid dream. theoretically.

Anyway, at the beginning of this process, that was my goal. So there's a lot of different options for solar system setups with different solar tile manufacturers and different battery manufacturers and different companies that will install all these things. And there's a 1000 different combos that you could piece together with different companies with different offers in your area to make something that works. I Kind of went with kind of a crazy but also a made sense solution which is just one company for everything which would be Tesla So it is a Tesla Solar Roof Tesla Power Walls for batteries and then the Tesla app to monitor and control everything.

And really the main reason I went this route was for Simplicity and integration this I paid a price premium for this. This was not the cheapest option. you can spec a much cheaper combo of solar panels and batteries and things like that, but just to have everything on the same page and have everything talking to each other seamlessly, this made the most sense. So then once I decided to go with Tesla then the other choice you might have heard about is either solar panels bolted to the roof or these actual solar tiles which are new roof tiles that are actually hundreds of tiny solar panels themselves, all interconnected to make a normal looking roof that's actually a giant solar panel.

and that is the one that I went for. And this is why I say this is this was a crazy option because I I did not actually need a new roof. Most people who go with the solar tiles option would either have an old roof that needs replacing soon or they're like about to build a new house and this will be the new roof that they put on it I wasn't in either of those situations. but also this was the way to get By far the largest total array with the most coverage with as many pitches as my roof has.

and also aesthetically, it looks really good too. I Gotta say, there's carb appeal either way. I Make my decision. I'm going with the solar roof I'm going Tesla's full integrated setup from there.

Not gonna lie, it is quite a process. There is a lot of uh of paperwork and Hoops to jump through. Also with Tesla's they've been kind of in and out of reliability like over the years they've been on and off with actually making this product. They've paused installations for a while, it was briefly canceled and then it came back and there were supply chain issues.

I Remember reading about all this and I was kind of worried. Uh, but for whatever reason, when I ordered which was in 2021, basically everything went perfectly smooth as well as it could have gone. You get assigned a a Tesla advisor just like for your project. for your solar project, they walk you through the whole process from the paperwork with the town from beginning to end.

So there was an ordering process, inspection, a measuring process, quotes, you know, filling out paperwork with the town you actually. when you're first trying to get an estimate, you actually submit your address and they go look on Google Images and look at your roof with satellite imagery and give you an initial quote. Then once you're locked in and you decide you want to go through with it, they'll actually come to your home with professionals and actually measure it and then give you a precise real quote and then start to order all the materials. You eventually get to the point where you get an install date, You start scheduling things out and then they come through with all the boxes of solar panels and they took up my whole driveway for a couple days.

There are people who have actually walked through this entire process in great detail. I'll try to link a good one below on YouTube but at the end of the day for me, the process I started when I signed the purchase agreement which was in November 2021 and finished with the activation of the system in July 2022. So eight months. But now that it's done, uh, we get to nerd out about the numbers.

sorry in advance. to anyone who doesn't like numbers I Feel like that's really the only way to explain how good it is and what's happening with them. so there's about to be a lot of them? Let's get into it. So first of all, the specs right? So this is a 29.313 kilowatt solar array size.

your boy's got a big roof and then there are three power wall threes which totals 40 and a half kilowatt hours. And then this is the Tesla app where all of the learnings and all the numbers happen when the system first got activated. I Just remember, like seeing it light up in the app for the first time, the numbers jump up and just kind of you just kind of get. I could stare at the app for a while like I could really get lost in the numbers.

Maybe it's just because I'm a numbers person, but there's a lot going on and that's it. Was exciting to see it all in real time and learn a lot of stuff. So I Think the app is really well done and it lets you visualize how much energy the solar array is currently capturing, how much energy the home is using and the state of charge and power output or input of the powerwall batteries, and then of course anything happening with the electro grid so you can see at this exact moment in time on a sunny morning in July The panels are bringing in seven kilowatts of power, five of which are powering the house, the last two of which are going into the power walls which are 38 full and it's not touching the Grid at all. There's already a lot of terms being thrown around here.

Here's a good way of thinking about it. Kilowatts is a measure of power. so one kilowatt is a thousand Watts A kilowatt hour, though, is a unit of energy collected. So a Tesla Model S battery, for example, is a 100 roughly 100 kilowatt hours.

And so if that battery were to Output a hundred kilowatts for an hour, then it would be at zero. So for my setup, the power wall three each one is about 13 and a half kilowatt hours each, so that totals forty and a half kilowatt hours. since I have three, and they support a maximum power output in or out of 15 and a half kilowatts. And then the solar system being 29.3 kilowatts means that basically it seems like the theoretical maximum of the electricity that can be collected at any one time is 29.3 kilowatts.

But as you're about to see a little bit later, that number may or may not be accurate. Either way, just hanging out in the Tesla app for a while, which you do a lot for the first few weeks. I Learned a lot I Learned a lot about what takes a lot of energy? What takes a little bit of energy? some of it. which did surprise me I Also learned that sort of the basic like existence level for this house is like 4 100 watts of power just because things are plugged in.

Even if every light is off, it just sort of sits around 400 watts. But you know, charging a phone or turning on a light or something like that basically doesn't make a dent at all. It doesn't show up in the app. Uh, turning on a TV might only take about 100 Watts uh or 0.1 kilowatts.

A computer can pull three to 500 watts if it's taking a lot of power. but surprisingly the big spikes come from the microwave and the toaster for sure. But the two absolute biggest draws of electricity in this house by far. And I think probably with a lot of others are number Two Air Conditioning and number One.

Buy a country Mile is charging the electric car I Think the best way to look at this is actually by Seasons So like I said, this system got activated in July So in the middle of the summer, so typical summer day in New Jersey is pretty awesome for a solar customer. The days are long, we get a lot of sun. It's great. This is what a summer day looks like in the app and this is a pretty good day for solar so you can see the sunrise is around 6 a.m the peak is around noon, and then this drop off till sunset around 8 to 9 p.m It's a lot of sun and on this day it generated a ridiculous 260 kilowatt hours of electricity.

Not all days are going to look like perfect curves like this by the way. In fact, the previous day was pretty cloudy so you can see it only generated 65 kilowatt hours. The next previous was better again. But yeah, a typical summer day.

You know get around 200 kilowatt hours from the Sun and then I Think this view is the most helpful. It looks kind of wild at first but you can quickly tell how to read it. It's basically how much power the house is taking and then where it's getting that power from. So over overnight you can see these spikes from the house are where I'm pulling from the grid.

This is actually just air conditioning overnight. Then when the sun comes out and the day heats up and the air conditioner turns on the lights and the appliances, everything comes on. It starts drawing more power, but it's totally covered by solar as you can see here and it's also filling up the power walls with extra solar as this happens so later in the day when the Sun goes down, that power draw is also supplemented by the power wall batteries. There were a lot of summer days like this on the absolute best day in this time I think I generated almost 300 kilowatt hours of electricity, but because of how much the house is using from the AC to charging the car every single day frequently I'd use 200 plus kilowatt hours of electricity during the day.

So my net grid usage would typically in these summer months be zero to slightly negative. maybe up to negative 50 kilowatt hours on a good day. Meaning I would generate and sell back to the grid. 50 kilowatt hours more than I used solid.

So after summer there is the fall, which you know the days are starting to get a little bit shorter, but also notably the temperatures drop off quite a bit so getting less a little bit less Sun but also using a lot less air conditioning. So here is a normal fall day in the middle of October Production day by day is dropping down Now here into the low hundreds. Uh, this is a day that I got just over 120 kilowatt hours of solar. pretty Cloud Free day Again, as you can tell by the graph and again if you look at the home usage, there's even smaller spikes and a smaller curve of air conditioning during the day.

So The house's needs are actually completely covered by solar. and then once the sun goes down and the power wall takes over, it actually did not touch the Grid at all, which is pretty sick and this was actually very common throughout the fall. Turns out the fall and the spring are the times where I generated the most excess electricity with basically everyday ending with net negative. And then there is winter and it turns out uh, winter can be a well in the Northeast areas.

especially brutal on these setups for a couple of reasons. Like first of all, as far as solar, these are the days when we're getting the days are the shortest. like the sun sets at like 4 P.M which is insane, but that's real. But it also turns out that most of the days are cloudy I Didn't really realize this like truly until I started looking through all the graphs but it's like one out of every 10 days is actually sunny and I you know I know it's cold and everything.

but I didn't realize how many days in the winter are just cloud cover all day. So then also my homes uh I'm pointing like you can see it. My home's air conditioning is electric, but my heating is natural gas so my natural gas bill is just going up and there's nothing my solar can do about it. But on top of all that you got to think about, the car and electric cars are far less efficient in the winter when it's cold than any other time of the year.

Battery trees have a certain temperature they like to be at. They like to operate at that temperature, so they spend more extra energy getting up to and staying at that temperature. So a normal drive for me might take say 15 percent of the battery on a commute during the summer. that same Drive during the winter will take 20 25 30 of the battery driving the exact same way just because it's so cold.

So that is a lot more electrical energy. So here's what some typical days in the winter would look like: literally only generating 20 to 70 kilowatt hours of electricity in a whole day like cloudy days would literally only be a handful and then for home use. So I actually went through this phase of like maybe I should charge my car less often to be off the grid more I was kind of playing around with that. so I would charge like every two to three days, but it honestly doesn't really matter.

You can sort of see which days I actually plug the car in and to be fair, the power wall handled it, but it did empty it out. so the next day I'm pulling from the grid until the sun comes up so it was basically like a lot of days around zero and then every time I had to plug in the car to fill back up, there would be a huge dent, just a huge positive net you stay on the calendar. so I actually had positive net grid usage. months for all of November December and January So I was pulling from the grid more than I produced solar all of those months.

But then sure enough, when we get to Spring things flip super fast. It turns out if you were to guess which month I would generate the most solar or the most excess solar, what would you think you'd probably guess like sometime in the peak of the Summer with the longest day June July Uh, for me, it was May in May I used 6 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, but I generated nearly 8 500 kilowatt hours of electricity and I didn't even realize this is another thing you don't really know for real until you look at the data and I'm looking at the graphs and May had basically every single day sunny during that month I think I had one cloudy day in May but June and July We do get a lot more thunderstorms out here in the Northeast and that actually does take a real hit on total solar. That's that's cloud cover, so they didn't generate quite as much solar as May. We're just learning weather patterns out here through graphs of solar generation.

Uh, this is also around the same month that I got the eight sleep. So the eight sleep is a pod cover that fits on a mattress like a fitted sheet, but it's temperature controlled so it can heat and cool each side of the bed independently. They reached out around May to be a sponsor and I said yes, So that's when I installed it I wouldn't say it, it replaced the need for aircon positioning. It didn't but it did actually legitimately decrease the total air conditioning you need when the bed is cooled off and the house doesn't have to be as cool.

So when it literally cools the bed before you get in, stays cool the whole night for optimal sleep, and then warms you up in the morning on autopilot every single day, which is sweet. So now that I know that air conditioning is the number two draw of electricity in my entire house, and if you don't drive an electric car, it's probably your number one draw, then it's good to know that you can. You can do something like this and obviously it'll take a lot less electricity from the wall than air conditioning would. Also, if you're curious I Talked about this on dope Tech but it's turned out to be pretty awesome.

Obviously, sleuth is super important and temperature is like top of the list for Sleep Quality Falling asleep faster, waking up less so investing in your sleep makes a ton of sense on top of maybe cutting into your AC use. So if you want to get a pod cover for yourself, you can actually use code MKBHD on their site and get 200 off. So I'll leave a link in the description and next thing into eight. sleep before sponsoring the video.

So it's time for the the big Summary: I've had this solar setup for a full year now, all four seasons. It's time to run the numbers, see if it was really worth it, and see if it's actually good. So let's start with the money question here. The this, like I said, was nowhere near the cheapest possible option.

Of course, going with solar panels and batteries. a lot of different possible setups. So my setup with the solar tiles, all the materials, all of the labor installation, everything, and the three batteries everything together was one hundred and twenty thousand, nine hundred, forty eight dollars, and Four cents. But also, as you can see, there's a federal tax credit down here of nearly thirty thousand dollars, bringing the total cost to me down to right around ninety three thousand dollars.

So the tax credit does fluctuate quite a bit. Uh, it's actually gone up like a lot since I ordered like a year and a half ago. Whatever it was. Uh, it's up to 30 now in New Jersey So it's called the Uh New Jersey Solar Investment Tax Credit.

If I ordered today, it would have been 8 thousand dollars more off. But you know it's fine. It's fine, everything's fine. I'm not mad, it's fine.

But the main question you typically see with an investment like this is what is the payoff period? How long does it take before that investment pays for itself in saved electricity? So that's a good question. And I had to do quite a bit of math here because every bill is different every week. Every month of electricity costs different amounts. Actually, my provider literally has different electricity rates every single hour and there are different averages per day per week per season.

But if I do a sort of a sweeping average for each month and how much electricity I've been using, the 54 megawatt hours of electricity that I've used in the past year would have cost about nine thousand, Six hundred sixty dollars. So again, that's a lot. But obviously air conditioning takes up a lot and a lot of that is driving an electric car every single day. So of course my gas bill has been zero dollars this whole time.

But you know that's where it comes from. So if if you divide that out by the total cost that I paid, it comes out to just under 10 years, 9.6 years. So if you if you Google like what's a good payback period for a solar setup, the answer that the AI pops up with is like six to ten years. Which you know if I think about it, it makes sense obviously.

And that's great because if the panels are warranted for 25 years and you pay them off in 10 years, then they're just paying you extra for the next 15 years however long you're in that house, which is great. so mine being on the longer end of that am I Mad at that? Not really I Think that's fine. Um, I Also do know that there are a couple of things that could that I could that could have been different to make that payback period shorter. Actually, the number one suggestion typically would be like okay, if you want to make the payback period shorter, get a less expensive setup and that would make sense.

But also you have to keep in mind the coverage really matters here. So I could have gone with a much less expensive actually a solar panel array from Tesla on the same exact roof. And because of all the pitches on the roof, they estimated they could have put panels down on certain parts and it would have totaled a smaller 19 kilowatt array instead of the 29 kilowatts of the solar tiles. I Know that because that's actually what I first signed up for an estimate for as I was like juggling the idea in my head.

Would that have had a shorter payback period or would that have been offset by much less electricity being produced and taking longer to pay for itself? I Don't know. but the other part of that equation that I'm thinking about now is just like I should just use more electricity so that it pays for itself faster I Want to get my values worth I am constantly in net negative. So I can afford to use way more electricity and so I thought maybe about switching. um, you know, various appliances that aren't electric yet? maybe even switching heating to electrical.

So that may be in my future. But now for all the miscellaneous weird quirks of having this brand new piece of tech on top of my house, because believe me, there are quite a few. So first of all, on the uh, the zero dollar electricity bill for the whole year? That is real, which is pretty awesome. But it's also interesting that I was able to achieve the zero dollar bill monthly.

But I also used positive net grid energy for those three months during the winter. So you might be wondering, wait a second, how does that work? And the answer is net metering credits. It turns out they roll over month to month, but then they get reset once per year. So meaning when it was first activated and in the First full month of August, I produced more than I used.

I ended the month with a credit of the difference which was negative 255 kilowatt hours and it says that on the bill. So that means the next month, even if I used 255 kilowatt hours, more than I produce with solar, I would still have a zero dollar bill because I have that credit to play with. But month after month after month during the summer and then the fall, I was building up more and more negative credits so that by the time we got to Winter those three months in a row, I was eating into the credit. but I didn't eat all of it.

so I didn't get all the way back to zero so the bill was still zero dollars every month. So then another fun thing. uh, power outages. I have had a few power outages uh, since getting the solar system installed.

most of them just because of thunderstorms and the grid going down for a bit I didn't even notice which was pretty sick I did not notice the lights didn't even flicker I didn't actually know until I got a notification on my phone from the Tesla app saying hey, Just so you know, you're disconnected from the grid right now, but you're running off of solar and or batteries right now so everything is good and you've got you know x amount of hours of backup left and it should get you till the next morning when the sun comes up again. And there's even a storm watch feature that will preemptively make sure the power walls are full if it knows the big storm is coming. And honestly, there is a pretty sweet Peace of Mind knowing for a fact that if I don't charge the car, the power walls have more than enough to just use the house like normal until the next morning. Air conditioning appliances, literally whatever and it'll be fine.

and when the sum comes out again, it'll start powering everything. I Could be completely off the grid for days or weeks at a time if I find somewhere else to charge the car. Now another fun fact: in the winter, in the Northeast you probably already know we get snow and apparently the surface of the solar tiles. the solar roof.

uh, stays just above freezing, just a little bit warmer than a roof would, which has some interesting side effects. Most notably when it snows a little bit. uh, the snow simply hits the roof and melts so it never actually accumulates on the roof and then the solar can continue to work. I Mean, if it's cloudy, you get a little bit of solar, but it keeps working and then you're the only house that doesn't have a white roof because there's no no snow on it.

But when it snows heavy, like like a lot, which it does a few times, what happens is it snows a ton and it actually does accumulate. and then when it accumulates, the outside layer kind of insulates the bottom and so the Bottom now has room to get warm again and so it warms up and creates a thin layer of water and then the whole thing just slides off of the roof like a sheet of ice. like the whole accumulated layer slides off on the water. So I didn't actually get videos of this happening with my own roof.

but there are some YouTube videos of this happening on. YouTube It's kind of crazy, literally. the whole roof section slides off in sheets and it actually lands in piles around the house, sometimes blocking a door or a driveway. It's not a small deal, it was a little bit frightening the first time it happened because I didn't realize what that loud booming noise was I was like is there is there thunder in the in a snowstorm? That's kind of weird.

but then I like see it in the window like sliding off of the roof which is crazy. then it piles up around the door and then then it. I gotta shovel it. But then last but not least, the fun fact: uh I lied to you all.

Uh, the the zero. That sounds silly. The zero dollar power bill is actually kind of a lie because my power company ruined it every month. For the past 12 months, my electricity bill has been 5.75 That's just because I have zeroed out all the charges thanks to that metering.

but they charge 575 every month basically just to have an account. So thanks guys! So let's just to wrap everything up here. My one year conclusion: Uh, this is an awesome piece of Bleeding Edge. Tech You can tell it's bleeding Edge because it's still rapidly evolving over time and it's still very expensive.

So for early adopters like me who are willing to take the plunge, willing to take that risk a little bit, it can be really awesome. It kind of reminds me of electric cars. There are a lot more affordable solar setups out there that are making a meaningful difference for a lot of people in a lot of different situations all over the world. There's also much more massive huge solar setups as well.

but I think we can kind of all get behind a technology, making more sustainable energy more useful, more efficient. and More Beautiful over time. I definitely learned a lot with this process. mostly in like how much electricity certain things specifically use, but also how much electricity a roof with solar panels on it can collect in different times of year, different seasons, and different situations.

But I don't think honestly I don't think I would change a thing I don't think I would change anything in what I did I've been probably waiting like six months to get a little more of a federal tax credit, but I'll hit one last thing. It was briefly mentioned in like a Tesla earnings call. I think it was that, uh, or maybe Elon just said it randomly, but that Tesla vehicles in a year or two by 2025 would all support bi-directional charging which would be amazing. I Don't know that that's actually going to happen, but having the cars be able to not just charge other cars, but even potentially serve as your House's backup battery would be pretty incredible.

These car batteries as we're learning are already way bigger and can support way more power output than any power wall. any home battery. one model S battery is equivalent to like seven or eight power walls, so who knows if Tesla actually does or not. But as of today, with the right box on the wall with the right inverter, the F-150 Lightning which has an even bigger battery can actually be your House's backup battery.

So I think the number of EVS that support this feature should only be slowly going up. But I think ideally there's a world in the future where instead of needing like a huge no, the current thing needing a big solar setup and all these fancy batteries, all you really need is a small solar, OA an inverter and your car battery and you have of the ability to be completely functional during any extended power outage or any emergency. Because we live in a world where there's another news story every week about the electrical grid being taxed and how these heat waves are running people's grids and air conditioners into the ground and too much of it is causing blackouts and literally actually deaths. So any strain that we can take off the grid is a win.

and anything we can do to operate on clean, sustainable energy is a win for everybody. So thanks for watching I'll hang out in the comments for a while, but feel free to subscribe if you enjoyed videos like this and the amount of work that goes into these videos on any kind of bleeding edge Tech and stuff like this in the future and let me know what you're interested in seeing next in the comments. Alright, catch you guys in the next one. Foreign.

.