Our area of the country experienced unusually sunny, hot, and dry weather over the past month.

Which means that although our gardens and lawn are struggling right now, our solar energy production was off the charts!

Our rooftop solar panels delivered their most productive month ever in July, eclipsing our production from last August by a whopping 9%!

Even though our power consumption was also elevated, due to working the air conditioning harder than normal, we still ended up with a small electric bill for the month, as well as additional solar energy credits to use to reduce our energy costs next winter!

Months like July, which was the warmest month ever in the history of the closest city to our home, are when having a home solar energy system really pays off for us.

Although our electricity usage surged by more than 50% from July of 2017 (we worked the air conditioning as hard as we ever have over the past month), our actual electric bill increased by just 13% from a year ago. More importantly, our bill was only a small fraction of what we paid in July of 2016, before we installed solar panels on our roof.

Despite our elevated power consumption over the past month, our robust energy production enabled us to continue building up solar credits we’ll be able to use next winter, when our system is likely to produce less energy than we’ll be using.

We’ve already built up nearly twice as many solar energy credits for next winter as we had for last winter. With three months left to likely build up additional credits, I’m optimistic we’ll have more than enough “money in the bank” to keep our electric bill as low as possible for the entire winter of 2018-2019!