Case Study: Solar and Battery Backup Inspires Energy Usage Awareness For These Asheville Homeowners
If Joe D’Agnese and Denise Kiernan wrote a joint memoir — which wouldn’t be entirely out of the question for these Asheville-based authors — clothes dryers as an underlying theme would make a certain sense.
The energy-guzzling household appliance, a fixture in 80% of United States households, has played a curiously persistent role in both of their lives since childhood.
We ran into Joe and Denise at a local farmers market about a year into their experience of switching to solar, and bonded over our mutual love for renewable energy. When they shared that solar had changed their perspective on energy use, we asked if they wouldn’t mind sharing a little more about their journey.
They generously agreed, and we hope you’ll enjoy learning about what inspired their switch to solar, their time living in Italy, and their complicated relationship with clothes dryers as much as we did.
Solar stats:
System turned on Nov. 30th, 2020
2 Tesla PowerWalls
20 SunPower 360 watt solar panels with a SolarEdge inverter
System size: 7.2 kW
SH: How did you two meet? It seems like you’d have a lot in common as two Italian American writers.
Joe: We met in New York City, when we were both working at a children’s math magazine at Scholastic. Apparently, our interest in math has stayed with us. Now, thanks to Sugar Hollow, we’re brushing up on our understanding of watts, watt-hours, and kilowatt-hours!
SH: What inspired your decision to go solar?
Denise: It was something we’d always wanted to do. We’ve tried our best to be responsible citizens to the planet. We don’t always succeed, of course, but to us it also just made logical sense at this point. I actually got my masters in environmental conservation, so I've always dreamed of being able to power things with the sun.
SH: How has solar changed your day to day?
Denise: We’re constantly thinking,“is it sunny? And if it’s not: how many hours until the sun comes out? I should get an electric car so I can power my car from the sun—like the Mars rover. You start going down these roads that I didn’t know existed when I was younger.
Joe: The other thing I like is that the system gives you a great deal of clarity about what you’re actually producing and what you’re using. Prior to that, if you’d asked me how many kilowatts are you using, I’d have no idea.
Denise: Yeah there’s a level of control, now. You can really nerd out on this stuff, because you can see what you’re using right now on the app. How much you’re making, how much you’re using.
Joe: Like, what’s making up the load right now in the house? Is it the a/c, the heat? In the moment, if we look at the app, and we can see how much we’re producing, and how much we’re using, we’re like, offended if we’re using what seems like more than we need to.
SH: So when we met at the farmers market, we talked about the clothes dryer…
Joe: We both grew up in homes with Italian mothers who would say, don’t crank up the heat, put a sweater on. It was always, “put more clothes in the dryer, shut these lights off.” But as a kid, I definitely didn’t totally get how it all worked.
Denise: The dryer thing was fascinating for me. I lived in Italy for years—we both lived in Italy—and the Italians have washers and no dryers. I’m thinking to myself, how much does electricity cost here? We come back to the states and end up with solar eventually, which makes us feel more clear about our energy usage. And sure enough, you run the dryer and you see this number runs through the roof. And then you’re like NO get those socks out of there, that’s not a full enough load to run the dryer!
Joe: It’s turning us into our mothers.
SH: So you both lived in Italy?
Joe: We lived there for a year when we were first married. We’re freelance writers, so we can pretty much live anywhere, as long as we have an Internet connection. Energy isn’t cheap in Italy, and our apartments didn’t have dryers. To dry our clothes, we hung them outdoors. Our apartment in Rome had a tall indoor courtyard, and we dried our clothes by clipping them to a long, squeaky clothesline that ran across from balcony to balcony.
The courtyard was always decorated with all our neighbors' clothing. It was a perfectly normal sight, and we made some laundry acquaintances that way. Now I know why Italy is so sunny. So everyone can do their wash!!!
It was only when we installed solar and were able to monitor our consumption that we realized just how much electricity we used when we ran the electric dryer. It’s our single highest energy-chugging appliance! (About 6 kW at the early end of the cycle.)
SH: It sounds like not only having the solar and battery backup installed, but also being able to see how all the energy is flowing with the app has been a really cool part of switching to solar for you.
Denise: We’ve realized if we use the energy we create with our solar efficiently, then we’re drastically reducing the times to pull energy from the grid. So it has made us more aware of “oh this actually can be done” without using fossil fuel powered electricity. Since it’s fairly easy, more places should be doing it. It becomes crystal clear on a micro-level like our home, but you can see how it easily extrapolates to schools, businesses, parking lots, governments, pretty much everything. Even cars!
Joe: If only we can control our dryer usage first.
SH: Ha! Exactly. One more question: what was your process like of working with Sugar Hollow?
Joe: Working with sugar hollow solar was a dream.
Denise: They didn’t ask us to say that! (Laughs). Communication was key, since this is all a lot to process. I’m sitting here now saying oh the app says blah blah blah, but when I first got this, I was like what is going on?? I’m so confused. But the communication was incredible.
Joe: They really held our hand through the process. Helped us with the paperwork that we needed to file, all that stuff.
Denise: At first it’s very basic, like what position is your house in, what roofline faces the sun, how much power could you possibly generate, how much power you need—they look at your past electric bills to see how much power you use. At first there’s just a lot of math and angles and sun and you decide if you want backup batteries or not, and how many. Then there’s the install, and they arrange for the power company to come out and put a new meter out. They worked with Duke energy on our behalf for a long time.
Joe: Then they power on the system and do a walkthrough, and they were available for questions.
SH: OK now really one last question because I’m curious: have you had any times you’d had to rely on the battery backup yet?
Joe: We’ve had power outages since we’ve put this in, and yeah it hasn’t been a problem. I love that that’s built into the security of knowing that the house is going to be up and running even with bizarre situations.
Denise: We get a lot of wind up here, and a lot of wires go down and power outages in this neighborhood are not unusual at all—and we usually find out about them from our friends asking “did you guys lose power?” And we didn’t. Or like when Hurricane Ida was going to pass through, we thought let’s make sure the batteries are going to be set at 100%, so if we lose power we have full batteries backup.
Learn more about Sugar Hollow’s battery backup offering, the Tesla PowerWall, here.
Curious about these environmentally conscious Asheville authors? Here’s how to connect with them online: