December 1, 2022 at 4:28PM

We had solar panels installed on our home in July, and they were finally activated on November 2 (long, frustrating story). That means we have just about a month’s worth of data to see the impact of our solar setup.

For context: For net metering, we’re capped by our utility to produce on an annual basis no more than 100% of the energy we consumed the previous year. There’s still a lot of solar panel real estate available on our roof, but we’re just about at the maximum of what we’re allowed to generate under these rules.

Since it’s calculated based on annual consumption/production estimates, the expectation is that we’ll generate a lot of surplus energy in the summer when we get lots of direct sunlight — but we’ll draw a lot of power from the grid in the winter when the days are shorter and Chicago is grayer.

Per the chart on this maybe-questionable website that came up in search results, November is the second-least sunny month of the year in Chicago on average. So I would expect to mostly be drawing from the grid for our first month of production.

Instead, we did pretty well! 58 percent of our energy consumption was from our solar panels, and just 42 percent from the grid. We even had three particularly sunny days where we generated more power than we used and were net exporters.

That’s pretty cool, folks. There are lots better reasons to get solar panels than energy use gamification but I think I’m going to really enjoy tracking these numbers.