3.78 kW

Well we just signed the contract for our next major project on the house. We are getting a 3.78 kW SunPower system for the house. This should cover pretty much all of our electricity needs, based on our current usage. We only had about 9 months of electric bills to base our usage on and our usage jumped when we installed the rainwater harvesting system for irrigating the backyard, we had to add several pumps to the electric to circulate the water and pump it into the sprinkler system. It didn't add a whole lot of electric usage, but it did add just enough to put us into the next tier of electric usage out here which meant a significant enough bump in our bill to make us consider installing solar panels sooner rather than later. The added electric usage/increase in the bill coupled with the incentives from our electric company and the federal government made us realize that now was definitely a good time to look into adding solar panels to the house. Of course there is also the knowledge that our electric rates will just keep going up and the incentives to install solar are only going to keep declining as the demand for solar is met (our electric company pays us money for every watt we install so that they can meet their renewable energy requirements).

We found a great local company who installs premium solar systems and are very much looking forward to getting our panels installed. The system will be tied into the grid so as we produce energy that we aren't currently using it will be added to the grid (peak hours) and then when we are using power and are not producing any electricity of our own (at night/ off-peak hours) we will take power back off the grid. This prevents the need for batteries to store the electricity we are generating so that it can be used later, if we were off the grid then we would need batteries and we would need to maintain the batteries and allocate space to all the batteries. For us being tied into the grid is a good choice, but it doesn't mean it is the right choice for every situation. It is just one way of doing things.