Personal Pursuits of a Canadian man
Below is actual production data over the past few years that I pulled from my inverters. It shows clear patterns, but always some variations. You can really see the years we had a lot of smoke or lots of snow. Note this is in kWh.
Below is a slightly different view from Spot Power which shows the imports vs. exports to the grid to decide when to switch from winter to summer solar rates.
Like my 2022 results post and my 2023 results I wanted to provide an update on how our solar did in 2024.
Overall we had a net contribution of $2720 and the results were a little worse than 2023 but slightly better than 2023. We had production of 12,000 kwh in 2024; of which we sold 7600 kwh back to the grid. This was about 1500 kwh less than 2023, I assume due to the Tesla being set to charge during the day so we don’t have to pay distribution and transmission charges.
For all our financial calculations we use the real solar club rate for what we produce in the summer, but only price our internally used power at the “grid” rate which we use 8.3 cents per kwh. Like in 2023 we use 6 cents for our variable Distribution and Transmission cost, so internally consumed kwh are always 14.3 cents. This is important as our results are not inflated using a higher export solar club rate, although that is our opportunity cost.
Our payback period remains at 9 years with an additional 5 years to go. This is the most common financial metric I get asked. I thought this was optimistic, but we have remained at 9 years payback throughout which is great.
Starting May 1st 2023 I wanted to see if I could generate enough credits to make an entire year without a power bill. I was super excited when I reached the end and Spot Power gave me my credit balance.
Here is my 12 month bill showing the credit.
During the year I never paid for my monthly fixed charges, the charges for grid electricity, the distribution or transmission or anything else. It is like having my own little energy reactor on my room making money.
Something to be aware of if you want to try this is you have to specifically ask the power company to not credit back your micro-generation credits. Generally they are required to this if you have a >$200 credit or so. That probably would have been smarter, but this seemed like more fun. My peak credit was $1350 which is how I managed to get through the winter with a bill.
Regardless it was another way to look at return on investment other than pure financial like in my 2023 performance post.
Like my 2022 results post I wanted to provide an update on how our solar did in 2023.
Overall we had a net contribution of $3107 and the results were a little better than 2022. We had higher production of 12,900 kwh in 2023; of which we sold 9100 kwh back to the grid. We used a little less in the house than last year, but bought a Tesla late in the year so that will change in 2024.
For all our financial calculations we use the real solar club rate for what we produce in the summer, but only price our internally used power at the “grid” rate which we use 8.3 cents per kwh. Like in 2022 we use 6 cents for our variable Distribution and Transmission cost, so internally consumed kwh are always 14.3 cents. This is important as our results are not inflated using a higher export solar club rate, although that is our opportunity cost.
Our payback period is about an additional 6 years, which is the most common financial metric I get asked. This is probably optimistic but would be great if true.
Was chatting with a buddy that just installed his system. Not surprisingly his experience was the same as mine, no production after snow. He was also told of the NAIT study and how snow wouldn’t be a problem…
Thought I would past another picture, this time with a bit of cold snap after a brief warming period.
Something the folks at Solar Clubs told me about was the ability to sell your carbon offsets. I did look into this a bit, and when I checked into it it was going to pay like $100 a year, which was not enough for me to sell my carbon credits as I expected them to increase in value over time.
However, a new provider is in Alberta and came out with a much more reasonable plan. If you go to solaroffset.ca they can provide a reasonable plan, and I signed up. In my case with a 12kW system I should make ~$500 a year from my carbon credits.
The program is for 10 years, and Solar Offset takes 30% of the sale of the credits in the real carbon market. Thus, if the value of the credits rise you get more money, and of course if they fall you get less. From my perspective that is a reasonable proposal.
The other part is if I sell the house before the 10 years is up the new owners aren’t obligated to continue using the program. This wasn’t the case in some of the other programs as they were forward selling the credits so couldn’t lose production. That’s just too messy for a home owner like me.
The only downside is by selling my credits I am not really carbon neutral in my power any more. I can feel good, but it does diminish the impact for sure. Given most of these commercial systems would do the same thing, I figure I can live with it.
One of the things I was told when I bought my panels was that snow didn’t make a major impact on production. I have heard this story from a number of other folks that have purchased solar panels as well. This position is always based on this NAIT study from 2018 https://techlifetoday.ca/articles/2018/solar-shines-in-dead-of-winter-even-in-edmonton
The approach appears scientific, and I’m sure it was, however, the conclusions simply aren’t what you’ll actually experience. I can say with two winters experience you will get absolutely ZERO production with snow on a normal 4/12 pitch roof. I have experienced wet snow, dry fluffy snow and blizzards. In ALL cases my production was effectively zero until it warmed up enough to melt the snow off the panels. Anyone who tells you differently is not telling you the truth.
Below is a picture of a recent snow followed by warming. You can exactly when the snow came, and when the Chinook came that melted it off.
In this example with a poorly written finger label, we hear a loud “whump” as the panels shed their snow as they warmed up. The time of the production jump – right after the snow slid off.
So what can you do? Nothing – but don’t be disappointed that you won’t be getting any production for as long as you have snow on your panels.
Sorry NAIT, your study doesn’t stand up to the real world conditions the rest of us live in.
As per my post from a couple years ago I used EQ Bank for a while for their High Interest Savings Account. At the time they had one of the best rates in the market, and the account was far easier to use than Implicity (now Outlook Financial).
However, things that are too good tend to disappear. Over the past couple years the rates for EQ Bank have dropped a bit, now at 2.5%. You can see their rates here. Still a competitive rate, and a very easy to use website, but there are better options in the market
The EQ Bank savings account does have some nice features, including free etransfers and bill payments, no minimum balance and an easy to use interface. However, they don’t have a debit card so it really isn’t practical to use on a day to day basis.
If you are opening an account why not use my referral code? We both get $20.
As per my last post on Outlook they took over Implicity and merged all the accounts. I found the process okay, with a couple bumps getting our new logins, but overall not too bad.
My fears of Outlook being lower than Implicity rates seem to be unfounded. Overall their HISA rates appear to be in line with what I received before, and their GIC rates are also very competitive. As of Jan. 2023 you can get 3.25% on all deposits which is one of the best mainstream rates I have seen. You can check out their current rates here.
There are some drawbacks to Outlook, their website and mobile app are limited at best. In particular you can’t transfer money from external accounts from their mobile app, which makes it nearly useless. You also can’t open up GIC’s from their sites, you have to phone in or do it via an online form. Not a great experience, but I don’t need to do that often so I guess it isn’t the end of the world either for so much higher rates than the big 5 banks or Tangerine.
I was an early saving with ING Direct, and at the time it was one of the best High Interest Savings (HISA) accounts you could get. Then they were bought by Scotia Bank and renamed Tangerine, and for a while it was still okay.
However, over the past couple years the value of Tangerine has really dropped off a cliff. They are no longer really competitive in any of their savings products, with a current rate of 1% vs. 3.25% with Outlook Financial. You can see Tangerine’s rates here.
I still keep my accounts for nostalgia, but I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone I liked.
This post follows up on my previous post for GoPeer results. As I had in that post I reduced my risk tolerance to C or higher, and continued with an auto-deposit
It was nice that GoPeer fixed their Net Annualized return during 2022. This makes looking at results far more fair, and informative. While gross returns are interesting, they are quite deceiving as I pointed out last year as you have a lot of charge-offs with these consumer loans. The number that matters is what you get to keep after all the fees, charge-offs, etc.
So lets take a look at our 2022 results below:
As you can see the gross yield looks great, but after 15 charged off loans it comes down to a much more realistic 8.2%. This still is considerable better than you can get at any bank, but is a much higher level of risk.
With the higher interest rates now available from Outlook Financial or EQ Bank the performance delta has really narrowed. Given that I turned off my auto-deposit in January 2023 and plan to just let the current principle and returns keep getting auto-invested. We will see what happens this year!
I enjoy the idea of lending people money directly, and GoPeer certainly seems to have a good volume. However, it is all consumer based and certainly I think there is more risk with consumers in many ways, especially in Canada with such high consumer debt.
So I tried a business lending platform called LendingLoop. It has a nice interface, and like others you can setup both auto-investing as well as auto-deposits. The big difference is the volume of loans. While I never have cash sitting idle with GoPeer, it is quite common with LendingLoop. It seems like a struggle to invest funds.
To combat this I used a higher per loan amount and still I have had trouble getting loans. I do use the same grades as GoPeer – A+ to C.
For 2022 the gross returns seemed reasonable, and LendingLoop doesn’t show you need returns, but after some quick match it looks like a net interest rate around 7 or 8%. This probably isn’t worth the risk in many ways, but I will leave the initial investment in the account and let it auto-invest and see what happens.
If you are going to try out LendingLoop, why not use my referral code and we both get $25? https://my.lendingloop.ca/lenders/retail_lenders/registrations/new?code=e35d06
I have been keeping track of my solar production every month since installation to see how I am doing. Overall the system has performed quite well. The economics are actually doing better than I expected.
For 2022 we consumed 8616 kWh, and we put back 8594 kWh, so we were able to produce 100% of our consumption which was great! On top of that we utilized 4007 kWh in our house, which we could calculate by taking the kWh produced by the system minus the amount we received micro-gen credits for.
One of things we noticed is when we have changed some of our behaviours in when we use electricity. Now that we know we can use our own, we have put a lot more of our heavy loads in during daylight hours like using the dryer or putting on the dishwasher. The 4007 kWh that we used in the house is particularly valuable as we not only save the power cost, but also the 6 cents per kWh or so of variable distribution and transmission costs. These are the most valuable kWh’s we produce.
On the economics side the value of our production in 2022 was $2570, which is a real amount. It consists of the microgen $ we get from Spot Power on the 8594 we put back into the grid, and the 4007 internally used kWh that is calculated at the power rate plus distribution and transmission. At this rate the system should payback in 7 – 8 more years, which is better than I expected.
I can’t wait for another year of production to see how we do in 2023!
With the solar panels clearly working I was then able to get my very cool solar production app installed and working. It told me lots of things I wanted to know and was very exciting to see.
I was able to get the web version to share so here is my current results.