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Using A Graphing Calculator To Lower Your Energy Bills

Lower energy bills

We all want to pay smaller energy bills, especially today when we can use alternative sources of power like solar and wind energy to produce our own free and clean energy at home.

Throughout the year, the energy bills will increase only in the colder winter months when the central heating system needs to work hard to create a cozy environment inside the house, and maybe during the hot summer days when the AC units used to cool the house will consume a little more energy.

How To Lower Your Energy Bills?

To lower your bills you need to produce additional energy that is not only free, but can be used to replace the energy provided by the grid.

A solar PV (photovoltaic) system can successfully produce free and clean energy for your household, especially in the hot summer days when the sky is clear and there is plenty of sunlight available.

However, your solar panels will not produce much energy during the cold winter months when the sky is cloudy almost all the time and you can barely see the sunlight.

If you live in a windy area, you can successfully use a wind turbine to lower your energy bills.

Solar Power and Wind Energy

Wind turbines can work well 24/7 if there is plenty of wind outside. They can also produce energy during the winter because they are not sunlight dependent.

However, the most expensive energy bills are usually paid during the cold winter months when the PV panels will not produce much energy, and a wind turbine may not be enough to cover the energy demand of the house.

Giving the fact that we are consuming a lot of energy during the winter for heating the house and produce hot water for domestic use, we can a solar water heater with good insulation.

Solar water heaters do not use the sunlight as PV solar panels do, they only use the radiation energy of the Sun, which is available even if the outside temperature is well below freezing.

A good insulation ensures very small heat losses, which means that you can produce hot water for your central heating system and also for home use by only using the Sun.

During the winter season we also have days when the sunlight is diffused, which will reduce the heating capacity of most solar water heaters.

However, even if you can produce hot water using the solar water heater only occasionally, the days when you don’t use energy from the utility company because your solar water heater produced free hot water for your home, will count on your next energy bill.

Another way to lowering your energy bills during the winter, is to use a geothermal heat pump that can heat your home and provide warm water for domestic use by consuming a smaller amount of energy.

How to Calculate Your Energy Needs?

Before installing a solar PV system or a wind turbine to start producing your own energy, you need to understand what is your daily consumption of energy in the house.

To do this, you need to check the meter every 60 minutes over a 24 hour period.

After you’ve gathered the data, you can use a graphing calculator to create a graph showing the energy consumption of your house during a 24 hour period.

When you know your energy consumption, you can choose a solar PV system or a wind turbine (if you live in an area with plenty of wind all year long) to lower your energy bills.

On https://bestcalculators.net/best-graphing-calculator-for-college-reviews/, I found a list of graphing calculators that can help you create a graph showing your household energy consumption during a 24 hour period and another graph showing the energy production of your renewable energy system during the same period of 24 hours.

By overlapping the graphs on the calculator, you can see (over a time period of 24 hours) the hours of the day when you are using energy produced by the panels, the hours when you are using only energy from the grid, and also how much energy you can save for night use instead of sending it back into the grid to power your neighbors.

Create Graphs For Solar Panels Systems with Different Capacities

You can create graphs for solar PV systems with different capacities (3 KW, 5 KW, 8 KW, etc.) to see what PV system you need to install to have an impact on your energy bills.

To make major savings on electricity bills, a battery system is the best choice.

The solar PV system produces the most amount of free and clean electricity during the day when the energy consumption of your household is reduced.

Instead of sending the excess energy back in the grid to power your neighbors for a small amount of money (much smaller than the price paid by you to use the same energy from the grid), you can store that energy for later use.

If you have a small battery system (with a reduced capacity) you can only store energy for nigh use, and maybe the next morning.

A Larger Battery Pack Can Produce More Power

A larger battery system can store energy to power your home for a longer period of time (during the rainy days).

However, isn’t very important, how big is the battery system used to store energy produced by your solar panels, because even a small battery pack (which is more affordable) can help you make some serious savings on your energy bills.

Final conclusion

Using renewable energy provided for free by the Sun (the wind on our planet is also created by the Sun), we can make massive savings on energy bills all year long.

A solar PV system installed on the roof or a wind turbine installed in the yard or on the roof, can produce free and clean energy to lower your bills.

Using a battery system to store the excess energy produced by the panels or a wind turbine, is another way of lowering your energy bills.

If you use warm water to heat your home during the winter, install a solar water heater to produce warm water for free, or a geothermal heat pump to ensure a cozy environment inside the house at a very low price.

To better understand the energy consumption of your home, use a graphing calculator to make all the calculations and the graphs required to see how to save energy and lower your bills.

Article written by:

I write about the renewable energy sector, electric cars and climate change issues. I love nature and good food, so I travel all over the world to see new places and meet new people. Magda Savin

1 Comment

  1. Mike Judge

    Why users that come here still use newspapers instead of reading the info online? It’s so hard to understand that paper means deforestation?
    Without trees, which are the lungs of the planet, it is obvious that climate change is getting worse.
    Beside lowering our energy bills, we also need to protect nature.

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