How To Make 2022 The Year Of $0 Energy Bills

One of the biggest grudge purchases in history, electricity! You can't touch it, you can't see it and you definitely don't want to feel it but without it your life comes to a grinding halt. Every quarter when the bill turns up you pay it, but you definitely don't want to.

What would you say if someone was to tell you that you could smash those bills and possibly even turn them into a credit? While not everyone can achieve the elusive zero dollar (or a credit!) energy bill but here are three ways you can drove those bills down and your savings up.

1. Install Solar
If you live in Australia and your house isn't under a rock, you will have heard about home solar power at some point.

Solar works by taking sunlight that is abundant during the day and turning it into electricity for your home to use. Systems are set up so your home's appliances, lights and electricity needs are powered first and then any excess is sent back into the grid for others to use.

The two ways you save money and start to delete those bills are by self consumption and feed in tariffs.

Self consumption is the number one way to save and is simply maximising how much of your own self generated electricity that you use. If you are buying from your retailer at say 30 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour), that means every kWh of solar you use, you save 30c. Simples!

Feed in tariffs are the credits that are applied to your bills for energy you send back to the grid. While exciting you traditionally only get around 5 - 10 cents for each kWh you send back so they are great but not as meaningful as using it yourself.

Solar is reasonably cheap to install at arounds $6k for a reasonably sized household system, can pay itself back in around 3 years and is renewable energy meaning you are minimising your carbon footprint in the process. In Australia, there have been over 3 million solar installations so far!

2. Install A Solar Battery
Solar batteries have been growing in popularity in Australia due to homes increasing energy needs and their vast inherent benefits.

Solar batteries work by capturing your excess solar production and saving it for your home to use later. The one problem with solar is that you can't use it at night, solar batteries solve that!

From a savings perspective it means you can store your clean, green, cheap solar energy you have made during the day for your home to use at night meaning even less energy being bought from your energy retailer.

On top of savings, solar batteries like the Tesla Powerwall can even power your home in a blackout meaning when the grid goes down, your house doesn't!

3. Install An Energy Monitor

Often, homeowners don't even know what is chewing up their power. Installing an energy monitor means you can see exactly what is using power and when. Giving you the power to make decisions and minimise your usage.

For example, if you find you are always doing your clothes washing at night when energy costs more, program your machine to run during the day to use up some cheap power or even solar power if you have it on your roof.

Small changes will incrementally have a big difference when taking a holistic view of your home's energy usage plus a good monitor is only around $100 and you can install it yourself.

Make 2022 the year you take control of your energy usage, save money and help have a positive impact for generations to come.