I'm expanding my system to cover summer demand, but I'll end up overproducing electricity during the winter. I have natural gas heating, and the prices can get pretty high. I'm curious about what others do with their excess energy. Do you sell it back? I'm considering some electric heating options to cut down on the gas bill, but I'm not sure about space heaters since they seem inefficient and possibly a fire hazard. A mini split looks too pricey compared to just selling the extra energy. What are your thoughts?
3 Answers
One option I use is dumping excess energy into a resistive heater for my warm water tank. It depends on how much power you're producing though, and with winter, weather and day length matter a lot. If you can figure out how much extra power you’ll have, it might help you find the best solution.
Consider checking if your gas furnace offers electric heat as an emergency option. It shouldn’t be too tricky to set up if you have surplus power, but automating it might need some extra thought. Definitely worth investigating further!
This is the type of advice I'm looking for! I should check the attic for the setup, and I plan to use Home Assistant to manage monitoring, which might help me program everything based on production.
Make sure to crunch the numbers on natural gas costs versus electric. If your furnace runs at about 85% efficiency and gas is $1.60 per therm, it boils down to roughly $0.065 per kWh for gas. Your utility might only pay you about $0.045 per kWh for excess, which means you'd save just $0.02 per kWh if you switch to electric. It could take ages to recover the costs of electric heating installations.
This is super useful info! My coldest month we used about 269 therms—ouch! With some new insulation, I hope my bills will drop this winter.
I need to run the numbers on how much I'll produce—my winter bill is usually one-third of my summer bill and I’ll be generating about 88 kWh a day. Got a battery for cloudy days too, so I have some flexibility.