California woman does full cost breakdown of her solar panels after one year to see if they're worth it

A woman from California has given a detailed breakdown of the costs of installing and running solar panels after a full 12 months – to find out if they were worth it.

She installed the system on her Palm Springs Airbnb after watching electric bills climb, including a brutal $892 peak in June 2022.

One year later, she ran the numbers month-by-month to see what the $20,000 investment actually did to her real-world costs.

The result was a bigger drop than she expected, plus a clear timeline for when the panels should pay themselves off.

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Her full cost breakdown after one year of solar panels

The Californian YouTuber said that her solar panel setup cost $20,000 in total, covering 20 solar panels, the electrical work for installation, and even a solar inverter.

She skipped a battery because they were too expensive for her, and she applied to get her solar panels installed in time for the net metering rules that let her sell extra energy back to the grid at the same price she bought it for.

Her system was sized based on what could fit on her roof, so not necessarily a perfect match for the most efficient usage.

She expected her solar panels to produce around 13,000kWh per year, but ended up landing closer to 12,000kWh because it was a rainy year.

She also called out a misconception: going solar does not automatically mean your electric bill disappears.

As long as you are connected to the grid, there are fixed monthly fees, and if your system is slightly undersized, you will still have to pull some power from the utility.

In the Palm Springs desert market town where she lives, electricity use stays high because of her AC, pool pump, and hot tub. As a result, she estimated that her typical consumption was around 1,400kWh per month.

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Were they worth installing?

Once the system was fully switched on, the savings showed up fast despite her heavy electricity usage.

February was her first full solar month, and her bill dropped to $280 compared to $557 the year before, a 50 percent cut.

For the rest of the year, she said her bill never went over $300 per month, and averaged out, she saw the monthly bill fall from $620 to $253, roughly a 60 percent decrease.

Zooming out to the full cost breakdown across the whole year, she estimated that electricity costs dropped from around $7,400 to just $2,916.

That’s around $4,500 saved in one year, which puts her payback timeline at roughly 4.4 years for the panels to cover their initial cost.

Selling power back to the grid helped, but not as much as she expected.

The total sell-back credits she was given were about $700 for the year, and surprisingly, summer did not generate extra sell-back because the home still used a lot of power for cooling and leisure equipment like her hot tub.

Her conclusion is straightforward:

In sunny, expensive electricity markets like parts of California, solar can become a no-brainer if you plan to keep the property long enough to reach the point where you have saved the same amount you paid upfront.

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