Solar Electric Bill Update - February

I posted about my first full month of electricity after installing solar panels here.  It was sort of long and difficult to understand so I'll make it much simpler this month.

I've now got some more information and plan to track my actual spending versus my projections before I had solar.

Previously, I thought I was being charged two account fees of $10 each.  Well, that was only because of a pro-rated month where I partly had an electricity bill from solar and another regular bill.  I spoke to the utility solar adviser and he credited me the $10 I was charged last month.

I just received my new bill for my second month, I'll call it February (even though it doesn't start and end during the same month).

Projected Solar Savings - $109.82
Actual Solar Savings - $86.78
Projected Contribution % - 74.8%
Actual Contribution % - 93.5%

Without further ado, he's a visual representation of this information:

The contribution % is basically the percentage of my total bill that is covered.  Yes, it's close to 100%!

The bad news is that my credit for production has been a little lower than initial projections, mainly due to a drop in the price per kWh that I mentioned in my last article.

The good news is that with the new monitoring system, I'm able to better track my usage.  With a combination of not wasting as much energy and using more energy efficient lighting (LED's), I have been able to drastically lower my bill so far.  I picked up several LED lights from Amazon.com.

The green line above is the percentage of my entire bill that was covered by my solar credit.  For the first month this was at 89.4% and this past month was 93.5%.

It's sure nice to have an electric bill that costs about $5 for the entire month!

Here's a chart of my actual solar usage versus the projections (based off last year's usage).

I plan to continue tracking this to see what happens the rest of the year.