You may be wondering if this journey will ever end. That's fair. It's easy to get carried away with the environmental benefits of moving to clean energy but the unfortunate reality is that for one household, the cost is significant and the cost/benefit analysis can be overwhelming. In the best case scenario, the transition from expensive, fracked-gas plants would be to utility scale solar operations backed up by battery storage. Individual decisions are important but they will not solve the societal need to combat climate change with green energy solutions.
So, here's my personal reality. After the painful exercise of charting my electrical panels, I thought I should look at my energy consumption since battery storage capacity is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh).
What is a kilowatt hour? It measures the energy usage of an electrical device or load. The higher the rate of power (kW) of an electrical device and the longer it is used (hours), the more electricity it consumes (kWh). That's clear but doesn't really help me. Assuming I can't backup every application I have that uses electricity, I need to isolate the critical applications. Top on my list would be HVAC.
Since I have Bosch HVAC, I searched online for "kWh rating Bosch heat pump." Here's the AI summary of results. A Bosch heat pump uses one kilowatt-hour of electricity to produce many kilowatt-hours of thermal energy. The amount of electricity a heat pump uses depends on the size of the home, the insulation, and the heat source. Clear, but not helpful.
So, what is my energy consumption? Evergy has what they call the Green Button. (Maybe the "green" is for dollars.) You log in to your account and download a .csv file of your monthly billing and usage data. The only information shown is for the start and end dates of each billing period, the total kWh used, and the cost. That's it. You can't see how your usage varies by time of day or day of the week, which would be helpful in considering ways to reduce your energy usage. So, more like an un-green button.
If you like spreadsheets, you can import your .csv file to Excel, and use the formula =DATEDIF(A1,B1,"d") where A and B are the Start Date and End Date fields, to calculate the number of days in the billing period. That lets you add a column with the formula for dividing the Usage total by the number of days in the billing period to yield the average daily usage. I liked doing this because it was concrete but I'm not sure it advanced my thinking except to tell me that we use a lot of electricity.
I'm officially overwhelmed. A simple spreadsheet is one thing but my inner nerd is not smart enough to dive into figuring the load capacity of all my electrical devices. It's time to call on the pros again. Stay tuned. I might be getting closer to the end of the journey.