Meet “Island NEV,” our Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. It’s small and super convenient, and with a top speed of 25 MPH, you can think of it as a street-legal, pickup truck-shaped golf cart! It’s great for the vast majority of our trips, whether it’s taking the kids to school (it fits four people, and we’re currently…

About my Setup My Home I have solar panels and a battery that feed into a Load Center (LC). Most of my home’s loads/circuits are wired to the “House Panel” (a sub off of the LC) while a few others are wired into each of the Load Center, the Garage Panel, and the Main Panel…

Installation & Initial Heating Choosing a plug-in, shared-circuit model made installation relatively straight-forward for me as I didn’t have to get any electrical work done first (no need for a new dedicated outlet nor hard-wire junction box). I just plugged it into the same outlet as my clothes washer and dryer, which hasn’t been a…

Essential Concepts Crash Course Heat Pump Resistive heating: A lot of heating with electricity works by just using wires that heat up when electricity is run through them. This is called resistive heating, and some common appliances that work this way include space heaters, hair dryers, stoves with coils, and many older water heaters. This…

There are various reasons to want a second battery, and a second battery is less helpful to some of those reasons than others, so there’s no simple answer. But if I had to make a general recommendation, it would be to get a second one because it’s an important factor in going all electric; that…

There are so many factors that affect how a solar energy system will perform and behave, including latitude and longitude, house construction, house orientation, roof shape, trees, neighboring buildings, nearby mountains, HOA, utility rates and regulations, family size and habits, whether you drive an electric car and how much you intend to charge at home,…

Major Components Load Center This is where everything comes together: PV, Battery, Home, and Grid (via the Tesla Gateway). Using the pneumatic system analogy (of the previous post), this is simply a chamber where everything is connected so air moves freely and pressure is equal throughout the system.

Electrical Energy Fundamentals While energy generally flows in one direction through the network of wires in your home — from the grid, towards your outlets — they don’t have to. You could plug a generator into any outlet in your home (but don’t do this, it’s dangerous) and energy flows “backwards” from that outlet to…