How To Maximise Electricity Bill Savings With Solar Power

If you’ve installed solar panels – congratulations! Here’s what Finn advises you do next to make the most of your solar power system so you’ll end up with the lowest possible electricity bills.

Transcript:

Here is a graph taken from the monitoring system on my house, the beautiful yellow curve, that’s my solar power system.

It’s a nice day. It’s not cloudy in the morning. The solar generation rises, it peaks at midday and then it drops off as the sun goes down. The jagged line under the big yellow area, that’s my house’s consumption. You can see it’s not steady. It goes up and down as washing machines switch on, stuff switches off and as you can see, I’ve tried to squeeze all that electricity usage into what I call the solar window.

When the solar generation is more than my house’s usage, we’re generating more solar electricity than we need. I’m exporting the yellow area to the grid and I’m earning a feed in tariff where the house consumption is in the solar window. I’m getting that electricity for free because I’m not paying for my solar energy – once I’ve paid off my solar power system of course.

Outside the solar window, you’ll see the jagged line is colored in red. That’s where it’s dark. I’m not getting any solar energy. So I’m buying all that electricity from the grid and I’m paying about 36 cents in South Australia right now to buy electricity from the grid. When I export it into the grid, because I’ve got surplus solar electricity, I earn about 16 cents. So obviously it’s more valuable to me by 20 cents to self-consume the solar energy than it is to export it. So, what I’ve done here quite successfully is I’ve squeezed most of my usage into the solar window.

We have really strong electricity retailer competition across the whole of Australia – apart from unfortunately WA, Tasmania and rural Queensland – you will earn a different amount for your feed-in tariff quite dramatically by retailers and different usage rates, again, quite dramatically by retailers.

Beware Of The Highest Solar Feed-In Tariff

But the secret is balancing the usage tariff with the feed in tariff. Some retailers will give you a really good feed in tariff and absolutely hammer you on usage tariffs. Some retailers will give you really quite cheap usage tariffs but give you a shithouse feed in tariff. So you’ve got to find the balance. And that depends on how much electricity you export and how much you import. And here, everyone is unique.

Finding The Best Electricity Retailer

So here’s how you find the best retailer based on your imports and exports. You wait at least one quarter after you’ve got your solar panels.  You have your first electricity bill at least, that shows you how much you exported to the grid and how much you imported from the grid. You go to this tool on my website. There you can enter these amounts into the tool and it will simply rank the retailers based on who would have given you the lowest bill.

It’s the best way I know of finding the retailer that’s going to give you the lowest electricity bill with solar. Most people don’t do this and they’re probably paying hundreds of dollars a quarter more than they have to just because they haven’t compared retailers.

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