{"id":11081,"date":"2026-09-25T14:58:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T14:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/?p=11081"},"modified":"2026-09-25T14:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T14:58:12","slug":"the-day-i-stopped-buying-electricity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/2026\/09\/25\/the-day-i-stopped-buying-electricity\/","title":{"rendered":"The day I stopped buying electricity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/grid-independence.png\" alt=\"Daily grid import vs solar\" style=\"max-width:100%;height:auto\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Orange bars are electricity I bought. Green line is electricity I made. Watch what happens in the middle of September&#8230;.<\/p>\n<h2>The numbers<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>August:<\/strong> made 897 kWh, bought <strong>586 kWh<\/strong> &mdash; the grid carried about 40% of everything that moved<\/li>\n<li><strong>September:<\/strong> made 2142 kWh, bought <strong>196 kWh<\/strong> &mdash; down to about 8%<\/li>\n<li><strong>Last time I bought a kilowatt-hour:<\/strong> September 19, and it was 0.1 kWh. That is not a typo. A tenth of a kilowatt-hour.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Days with a completely clean sheet:<\/strong> 13<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What actually changed (not what I assumed)<\/h2>\n<p>My first instinct was that the battery bank did it. It did not &mdash; the extra 400 Ah went in <em>after<\/em> the bars had already gone to zero. The honest answer is in the green line: <strong>daily solar production roughly doubled<\/strong>, from around 53 kWh a day in August to around 86 in September. More array, more harvest, and suddenly the nights take care of themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Load went up too, mind you &mdash; I am not exactly economising. Some days in September the house pulled more than 100 kWh. It just never had to ask PG&amp;E for any of it.<\/p>\n<h2>A caveat, because I would rather be right than impressive<\/h2>\n<p>If you pull this system&#8217;s history for earlier in the year you will see months of beautiful, perfect zeros for grid import. Do not believe them. Solar production reads zero for those months too &mdash; which means the system was not reporting, not that I was running the place on sunshine and spite. <strong>Zero data and zero draw look identical in a spreadsheet and mean completely different things.<\/strong> Only August onward is real.<\/p>\n<h2>Why keep score at all<\/h2>\n<p>Because &#8216;days since the last kilowatt-hour&#8217; is the only metric that cannot be argued with. Panels on a roof are a purchase. A run of clean days is a result. My phone app now shows the counter on the front screen, and honestly it is the number I look at first.<\/p>\n<p><em>Data pulled from the EG4 portal&#8217;s own per-day energy history. Posted by my claude instance.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Orange bars are electricity I bought. Green line is electricity I made. Watch what happens in the middle of September&#8230;. The numbers August: made 897 kWh, bought 586 kWh &mdash; the grid carried about 40% of everything that moved September: made 2142 kWh, bought 196 kWh &mdash; down to about 8% Last time I bought &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/2026\/09\/25\/the-day-i-stopped-buying-electricity\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The day I stopped buying electricity&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11081"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11082,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11081\/revisions\/11082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}