After reading quite a few comments, (20 years as a electrical technician) a lot of the homeowners should not be going anywhere near their electrical system. Best advice I could give is to get a license electrician to conduct the tasks you would like completed. Get as many estimates as you need until you find a person you feel is trustworthy, respectful and honest. The peace of mind is worth it!!

Ah yes, the TOU rates can be a blessing and a curse. And believe me, if I lived just a couple blocks away, I’d be in GA Power territory, having similar PV billing structure to your APS. I appreciate having net metering. It seems to be somewhat fair. Our residential rate is about $0.09/kWh, and we get paid $0.047/kWh for net monthly excess. In designing the system, I did not count much on the excess, because I knew the size of the array wouldn’t produce much of it. Happens in 2-3 months per year (mostly Spring, sometimes Fall), and it’s a very small 100-200kWh each time.

The utility calls the $0.047/kWh a “cost recovery” rate, presumably reduced by what it costs them to deliver “my” kWhs to other customers. I do not know much about electrical grid physics, but my guess is the electrical energy from my PV system probably does not “travel” very far before it is used by someone on the local grid.

For anyone thinking about it, knowing your consumption well, or in our case modeling the consumption of a new home within a reasonable margin of actual is important when deciding on a size of your PV system, given the type of PV billing structure your utility has.

Paul, this seems to be another case of people pushing to get their products or services put into codes so that they can create new or expanded markets without appropriate vetting by the code people. Right now, there is an argument between the breaker manufacturers and the AC manufacturers over who is at “fault” and who should pay to figure it out. In the meantime, I suspect that we will all have more customers who are annoyed by nuisance tripping in the meantime.

When we installed our PV in the summer of 2021, Arizona Power had a “power purchase agreement” rate of $0.1049/KWh, which is “fixed” for 10 years before changing to an undefined “market rate.” APS lowers their power purchase rate 10% per year. It is also not a “net” measurement, so any flow into the house from the grid arrives as the TOU rate, and any flow to the grid gets the fixed “power purchase” rate. In high-cost times, the TOU rate can be about $0.23/KWh, but at wintertime super-low mid-day rates about $0.03/KWh. Of course, the latter is when we tend to have significant “direct use” of the PV power (as measured by Sense), and the former is at the start and end of the day, when the PV is non-existent or low. A programmable thermostat helps, but a cold-sensitive wife and her sister require more of the high-cost grid use in colder weather. We’re all-electric also, but we have gas in the street, if we wanted to pay about $10K to connect it and retrofit-plumb our slab-on-grade house, not counting changing appliances and converting HVAC to dual fuel. Not gonna happen.

Roy, several instances, both in our personal home, and in client’s homes, so far with both GE and Eaton, both dual function AFCI/GFCI. The AF function was tripping in both. GE replaced the affected breakers for us with updated firmware versions and this helped. We replaced Eaton’s breakers with newer versions at the local supplier, and that helped, too. The supplier said they had a whole bin full of finicky AFCI breakers.

As to the GFCI’s tripping on compressors, give it time and they’ll resolve that, too. Of course, we’ll pay for the R&D costs at $70+ a pop.

Yeah, a set of breakers for a new house these days is frequently $1000+.

Another emerging issue is that the latest edition of the NEC is requiring GFCI’s on air conditioner outdoor units. This is due to an isolated case of a child getting electrocuted on a unit that was later proven to be not grounded properly. The problem with this requirement is that many of the new variable-speed compressor units cause nuisance trips on GFCI’s. Have any of you seen this problem in the field yet? It is causing the equipment manufacturers a lot of concern.

Have any of you had problems with AFCI? I know of one case where an LED light fixture kept causing it to trip and another where the refrigerator kept causing trips. In both cases, replacing the AFCI with a conventional breaker solved the problem. I doubt that the LED or refrigerator were really having a “fault” since both houses are still standing. I am just guessing that AFCI’s have problems with some electronics used in high-efficiency motors and LED’s. Perhaps the code bodies gave in to the AFCI manufacturers too easily and too soon?

watt if you had something that told you how much you’re using now? Emporia or Sense, for example. if you could set a notice “above 80A” that might help.
you could check the house meter but why would you if it’s just the microwave?
Span panel might automatically reduce load X when load Y goes above limit but that’s $$$.

A clarification to the above: diminishing, flat, or increasing electrical loads for homes were meant in relation to similar all-electric older homes. A heat pump water heater with COP of 4 is a big one. Replacing resistance heaters in rural GA with even a simplest heat pump would be another one.

Glad to see a fellow PV watter, Marty! You might be interested to know that our local EMC (Sawnee EMC, north metro Atlanta) has just increased excess PV production rates from $0.047/kWh to $0.0525/kWh effective in May 2023, and we are not paying any extra “solar” charges on top of the regular base charge. The letter did not mention what, if anything, will happen to consumption rates in May ;-). With our smaller system that covers only about 53% of yearly energy needs (all electric) and net metering, this rate increase won’t make much of a difference. We’re using the grid like battery storage. In fact, a house battery in our case would make no financial sense.

But I am digressing. Allison wrote about electrification house cleaning, and like a distracted toddler, whenever I read “electric”, I navigate towards PV. Maybe, as you map your electrical circuits, sketch in a “future” PV circuit.

A very good set of points, Paul. It is interesting that some utilities are now looking to tie privately-owned battery systems into their grid, under their optional control, so that they can ultimately have a highly distributed battery-backup system to supplement large-scale more-centralized battery systems. And, of course, make use of the investment that the homeowners and business owners have put in. When batteries with the necessary control systems become cheap enough and powerful enough, more people with solar or wind systems will install them, and such utility-connected control could reduce the prices of their grid connections and power consumption, as a trade-off by the utilities. Of course, the utilities will want to slant it heavily in their favor, as ours does now with relatively low payment rates for solar injection into the system, but averaging higher rates for purchased power, plus charges for the “privilege” of being connected to the grid. Nonetheless, we have been producing about 90-95% of the power that we consume (on an annual basis) with no battery system, while reducing our annual bill by 65-70%. To get to 100% coverage of our bills by adding more panels, including the extra charges for being grid-connected solar, we’d have to drop our ROI from 7-7.5% (after tax credits) to about 6.5% or maybe less, since they’ve reduced the payment rates per KWh. (I was originally aiming for 8%, without realizing the size of the extra charges and the amount of two-way power flow even when the sun is shining brightly on the panels, but I’m still happy with 7-7.5%.)