“Full solar home” is a term I coined meaning a home that produces as much energy as the home and vehicles use.
Compared to a conventional house and internal combustion vehicles (ICEs), a full solar home and electric vehicles (EVs) can eventually save you more on energy — and interest — than the price of the home, while you pay off the home 10 years earlier.
It’s not magic, it’s math. I know it sounds unbelievable, so I made an online interactive calculator where you can prove it yourself. It’s fun and easy. It has nothing to do with tax credits or incentives, selling power, etc. The calculator also counts emissions.
The calculator shows your potential savings on energy. There’s also a neat “family-fintech” trick to leverage your energy savings and save up to another $100K on interest, while eliminating 10 years of payments.
The massive wealth transfer is automatic: it’s the money you don’t spend at the gas station, the power company, and for unnecessary excess interest. As you can see in the calculator, it really adds up.
It took way too long to figure out how to get enough solar onto a typical-size home. Of course, in retrospect it’s obvious. For example, the home depicted above is only 48 feet wide by 52, and can fit up to 24 kW of solar panels, facing south whichever way the home faces, and out of sight, too. Other design approaches can fit even more solar into the same size footprint.
For reference, in most of Florida, lower half of Texas, etc., 18kW of solar produces as much energy as the home and two average EVs use at 15,000 miles per year each. That much solar can be installed as part of new construction today for about $30K. If you need more solar, it just means you use more energy and will save more.
Here’s a fun fact. Many people spend far more at the gas station than they do for home energy, but even two EVs use much less energy than your home in most cases. If you already have even half enough solar for your home, you’d save more money and eliminate more emissions by using that power for EVs.
Another fun fact: very few existing home solar systems will work at all when the grid goes down. A properly designed system can allow you to use your own solar power, with EV or other batteries for backup.
My goal is to make full solar homes a new normal. This is undeniably a new value paradigm in housing. They are feasible, and they are amazingly economical. Therefore, sooner or later they are inevitable.
Disclosure: This is my retirement hustle. I have published a website freely offering all of the information that architects, builders, engineers and homebuyers need to design full solar homes. The design approaches shown make full solar homes work anywhere that snow does not accumulate on roofs, meaning they work where about 75% of new homes are built in the U.S. I don’t sell houses or solar or EVs. However, I work with a couple of architects and engineers and we do offer plans and advice.
I hope to start a conversation here on a topic that I hope the Community will find interesting. I welcome the most skeptical comments and especially feedback on how I might better explain and spread the word about full solar homes.
By the way, here's where the solar goes on the little house above.
Thanks for reading. And speaking of reading, try my wicked, dark satirical novel, The Big Karma Law Firm.