This past May my wife and I finally pulled the trigger and bought what we intend to be our “forever home.” We’d been looking for several years, and just had never found the right house, in the right place, at the right price. We ended up with a ~1,700ft² house just outside of Port Townsend, WA, in a newly-constructed development. It’s all one level, on just over a quarter of an acre of land, with a nice back patio and flat yard for the dog, and has a three car garage - all things we were looking for. We wish it wasn’t quite so far from Seattle proper, but Port Townsend is a nice little town and there is enough of what we need locally that our trips across the Hood Canal Bridge should be somewhat infrequent.
Now that we’re in our forever home, my mind has turned to making it as efficient and self-sufficient as possible. It’s already an all-electric home, with a heat pump system for HVAC, a hybrid heat-pump water heater, and electric cooktop and oven. Unfortunately, the Jefferson County Public Utility District (JeffPUD for short) was not as proactive as they should have been, and the local grid is not quite up to the demands that new development have put on it. They’re a pretty small PUD, without much in the way of excess capital, and they’re still in the process of planning for expansion and a new substation to provide adequate power for the long term. This past winter there was a multi-day outage during the really cold stretch - not a great situation.
Fortunately, despite what conventional wisdom might otherwise lead you to believe, Washington State does get enough sunlight to make solar a useful power generation alternative. Washington also has nearly universal net metering, meaning that excess electricity generated by private solar can be fed back to the grid and used to offset consumption. Excess power credits above your consumption are banked, so in the summer time when the days are really long you end up banking credit to burn down over the winter. When combined with batteries to store power for overnight and emergency use, you can end up only having to pull power from the grid when using a lot of electricity, or when doing something like charging an EV (though even that too can be managed in a way that avoids pulling much from the grid).
I’m a true neophyte when it comes to evaluating the options for a home solar plus battery system, so I’ve been doing as much reading as I can to try and get at least a basic level of knowledge. There’s a lot to learn, for sure, but enough people have done this that there is ample available material to draw from.
For now, my core objectives are as follows (subject to change as I learn!):
- Install enough solar capacity to reach annual “net zero” on my electric bill
- Install enough battery capacity to have a safety buffer in the dead of winter
- We want to be able to run the heat pump plus a handful of critical circuits (fridge, microwave, lights/outlets)
- If at all possible, have ability to integrate V2G/V2H from an electric vehicle in the future
In terms of numbers, I expect that we’ll end up with something in the neighborhood of 12kW of solar and 20kWh of battery capacity. I have a rough idea of what the cost should be, and how much of that should get offset by the 30% Federal Tax Credit for Solar Photovoltaics program.
I’ve been in touch with one installer through EnergySage, and I’ve also directly engaged two other installers that are local to Port Townsend. I have preliminary proposals in hand, so now I have to dig into the details and start to zero in on how well I can meet my objectives.
The two front-runners at this point are systems built around either Enphase components or Tesla Powerwalls. There are pros and cons to both. Over the next few weeks and posts I’ll share what I learn and try to map out my reasoning as I approach a decision on which way to go. I plan to post updates about installation and commissioning too, but that likely won’t happen until late summer at the earliest.
Stay tuned, this is going to be a fun journey!
Other posts in this series:
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