Empower on Evan Hoffman

One Year of Real Data From My Solar and PowerWall System

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:24:38 +0000

On November 8, 2025, I marked the one-year anniversary of my home solar panels. Installed by Empower, the system includes 36 solar panels and two Tesla PowerWall batteries. Overall, it generated 17,122 kWh while my usage was 18,644 kWh, resulting in reduced utility bills. I find the system beneficial, despite minor issues.

Solar Energy Update: My Experience After 6 Months

Sat, 10 May 2025 08:57:08 +0000

It’s now been 6 months since my rooftop solar panels were brought online and started producing power so I figured it was a good time for an update. So far I haven’t had any problems with the system at all and am very satisfied.

Below are charts of weekly total kWh, blue is pure solar generation, green is power grid net draw/return, and yellow is how much the house actually uses (load):

My First Net Zero Bill with Solar Power

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 03:54:34 +0000

I recently got my PSE&G bill for Feb 20th to March 20th and it was $15.30. Looking into it I saw that my billed kilowatt-hour (kWh) for this period was 0 - zero! The $15.30 charge is from PSE&G’s $0.54/day charge to be connected to the grid plus some taxes, so this is as cheap as it can possibly get while still being on the grid. I was actually surprised to get to net zero this early in the year, I figured it would take another couple months of high-insolation to build up the energy credits, so this was pretty cool.

No Grid Draw for 20 Hours: A Solar Success Story

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:32:37 +0000

Solar, battery, grid for Feb 23, 2024

Above is a chart of solar generation (orange), grid draw/return (yellow), and battery charge percentage (red, right Y-axis) for yesterday, February 23, 2025. I was surprised to see basically no draw from the electrical grid from ~8:00 AM on 2/23 until 4:30 AM on 2/24 - nearly 20 hours.

I’m really curious to see when I’ll make it to a full 24 hours - possibly within the next month! Summer will definitely be interesting since there’s a lot more hours of sun, but also much higher baseline load in my house due to air conditioning.

Powerwalls Achieve 100% Charge from Solar Energy

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:50:02 +0000

Today was the first day of 2025 that the Powerwalls charged to 100% just from solar power. Once they got to full power, excess power was sent back into the grid. Check out the graph below:

Power production for Jan 27, 2025

Sunrise was at ~7 AM and the sky was pretty clear all day today. The Powerwall got to 100% around 2:48 PM and didn’t start discharging until around 3:50 PM. This is pretty cool since it’s only been 37 days since the Winter Solstice. I didn’t really expect to generate this much power until much closer to Spring.

Snowstorm Impact on Solar Production: 5 days Later

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:08:37 +0000

It’s been 5 days since the “big” snowstorm that covered the solar panels and today is the first day the temperature has really gotten above freezing:

Temperature for the past week (Jan 17 to Jan 25, 2025)

I’m finally starting to get back to some reasonable solar production:

Solar production - Jan 24, 2025

Looking back over the past 10 days, this is still significantly below pre-storm levels: