Pierre Marasti's electric home and car runs on the sun

We haven't paid for energy in five years and haven't burned anything in seven years.

In 2020 we installed 36 solar panels covering three sides of our roof (10kW) and a 13.5kWh battery. The house is 145m2 and everything is electric but not necessarily top spec. We have a normal resistive hot water cylinder, normal resistive hot plates for cooking and resistive electric heaters for heating the house. It isn't the most efficient set up but it works for us and thanks to our large solar system we are powering the house for ‘free’. 

Our next hot water system will be a heat pump to be more energy efficient, but we do not feel any pressure to change our hot water cylinder before the end of its life as we produce enough electricity with our solar system. 

We always had an electric resistive cooktop. It is a lot healthier to cook with electricity than with gas. My father died of lung cancer and knowing how unhealthy it is to have a gas cooktop it seems mad to me that anyone would want that in their homes.

We also had electric heaters but we discovered that Ecotricity was offering certified carbon zero electricity so we decided to stop using our polluting and unhealthy log burner in the living room as well. Beyond reducing our emissions, using electric heaters instead of the log burner drastically increased the air quality in our house and it is also a lot more practical. You don't need to get wood out in the cold, you avoid all the dust and wood chips in the house etc. 

We ditched the gas guzzler for a Nissan Leaf in 2018. Our main goal was to reduce our emissions but we were paying over $400 per month on petrol and now we just pay $40 for public charging when we travel and charge the car on solar. 

Beyond having saved more than $30,000 driving about 120,000km since 2018, EVs are just so much more fun to drive with a lot of instant torque and no vibrations. It is a completely different and much more enjoyable experience. Also people don't realise that unless you are travelling, you charge at home so you never need to go to the station, which is a lot more practical.

We try to avoid using grid electricity now so we try to shift our energy usage as much as possible towards the middle of the day when we produce electricity. What we love most about it is that we live with zero emissions in a much healthier home than before, but I can't deny that we really enjoy receiving our electricity bill every month to see how much money we made by exporting our excess solar power. We were paying about $270 per month before but now with solar the bill is about negative -$30 per month thanks to exports. 

The energy security that a solar and battery system brings you is also a game changer. In case of a blackout our battery disconnects us from the grid and we keep the power on while everyone else is in the dark. And in case of a natural disaster, such as the coming earthquake, it could be a lifesaver.

My advice is not to wait. Electrify your life as fast as you can and when installing solar, install as large a system as possible because the larger the system, the better the returns and the energy independence.

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