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Sonya Taylor’s monthly electric bill on her Hidden Valley home south of Hollister used to be about $800. Now she pays nothing to PG&E on her ranch in southern San Benito County and she’s loving it. She said she never imagined living off-the-grid could feel so good.
Electricity is not only not inexpensive anymore, but also not always dependable. So, when Sonya and her husband Steve decided to build a new home on their ranch located three miles south of the east entrance to Pinnacles National Park, it was an easy choice. Especially so when PG&E informed them it would cost more than $60,000 to run a power line from San Benito Lateral to the proposed location of their home, about a mile away.
Steve says he is semi-retired, but he still has cattle and horses and is a partner in a hay broker business with his son in Arizona. Sonya has been an independent financial advisor for 29 years and works from home for Emerson Equity in San Mateo. She also shows horses and the two met at a horse competition in Paso Robles. She hails from Kentucky via Michigan, eventually landing in Hidden Valley.
After they met, he moved from Arizona to San Benito County. They wanted to live away from town, so they leased a ranch in the San Benito River Valley for three years. They lived in a home right off San Benito Lateral, built in 1913. They bought the ranch 13 years ago. Then, four years ago, they decided to build their new home and chose a beautiful spot nestled in the surrounding Diablo Range.
While they knew they wanted to build their new home without PG&E, they didn’t want to go all 19th century, resorting to candles or oil lanterns for light, and wood, coal, mesquite, corn cobs, or even cow chips for heat. They both required dependable communication with the outside world. And, in addition to using the sun to power her computers and their appliances, they needed a dedicated phone line, which they got through Paicines-based Pinnacles Telephone Company, which has been operating since 1955.
Going off the grid was more than just deciding to do without hooking up to PG&E. Even as far out in the country as they were, there was still an approval process they had to maneuver through with the county. Along with providing building plans for the new home, they needed to show the county how they intended to provide power to it.
The sun versus the grid
After learning it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to hook up to the grid, the Taylors said it was a simple choice for them.
“It’s a 48-volt system that creates electricity all day and stores that electricity in batteries,” Steve said. “It operates the solar panels throughout the day, pushing power into 16 six-volt batteries. If we end up with multiple days of overcast and we’ve used up the battery power, I just fire up the generator. It operates the house and charges the battery system through the solar inverter system.”
“We were pretty fortunate in the permit process,” Steve added. “We had a lot of conversations with other people that had been building homes and discovered there’s a lot of nightmares in dealing with San Benito County. The process turned out to be pretty straightforward, and it took us a year to get the approvals done to build a home.”
“Some things were pretty good despite the nightmare stories we heard,” Sonya said, adding the only hitch in the permit process was the fee they were required to pay that was supposed to go to Jefferson School, about a mile from their home. “A couple years after the house was done, the school still had not received the money that we paid to San Benito County School District. We only found out after someone from the school came here asking for the money.”
Knowns and unknowns
“When you build an off-grid home, there’s a lot of engineering that goes into it, that’s part of the permit process,” Steve said. “You need to have an upgraded insulation system. The heat and air conditioning needs to be more efficient than normal.”
He continued: “It’s suggested that off-grid homes use propane appliances. Sonya chose not to do so with some of the appliances that use a lot of electricity. And that’s why she uses those appliances when the sun’s out. We’re using the power that we paid through the solar system instead of propane.”
They saved even more money when Steve took over the duties of general contractor, though he admitted he had no such experience. He worked with several contractors, in particular Mitch Bourdet, who framed the house and helped coordinate with the other subcontractors. Sonya worked with architect Jason Guerra on the interior design of the home.
Even though they love their off-the-grid home, they said it was often a learning experience.
“We don’t run the dishwasher or the vacuum, the oven, or the heater at night,” she said. “We have batteries to do normal living, but not major things. We do have a wood stove for when we come in at night. And, the house is so well insulated, it stays great.”
Steve said he has no regrets about using solar.
“When I moved to California and looked at my PG&E bills I almost had heart failure every time,” he said. “I had a 2,500-square-foot home in Arizona that was 100% electric. And my average power bill was $150 a month. Then I moved here and the average power bill was $600. It’s just insane.”
During the recent storms that raged through the county, Steve said that the two older homes, where a renter lives in one and his ranch manager and his family live in the other, lost power for 12 hours, while his lights didn’t even flicker.
Steve said there are basically two ways to set up solar panels: on the ground or on the roof.
“In San Benito County, in their infinite wisdom, they’re going to charge you a permit to build this solar system on the ground you own,” he said. “But there’s no additional fees for the permit if you put it on your roof. So, it was a no-brainer for us to put it on the roof, because who wants to sit in the back or front yard with views like these and have to look at solar panels.”
Then there was what Steve described as learning the hard way: solar-generated electricity is not as consistent or regular as what the power company delivers.
“What that means is when the electricity comes through your power company, it is a constant voltage with no spikes going in and out of your home,” he said. “In today’s world, everything has a motherboard that’s run by a computer. I don’t care if it’s your dishwasher, your refrigerator, your television, everything’s run by a computer. And computers are extremely sensitive to power surges. And solar has peaks and valleys. So, it’s very hard on motherboards and computer systems.”
Fortunately, he said Extreme Air Inc. in Hollister, the contractor that installed the wiring in the home, had an easy fix to eliminate power surges.
“They came out and put in this box that changes the amount of electric that’s drawn during the startup process of the heat and air conditioning system,” Steve said. “And since they installed that, the power surges from that have gone away.”
Asked why Extreme Air did not anticipate the surges, he said, “I think a lot of this is all such new technology everybody’s learning as we discover it.”
Sonya concurred: “I work from home, and I have CNBC on the stock market on my TV, and at least a couple computers and a bunch of stuff running in my office. That’s not normal for out here. So, somebody building a house out here in the middle of nowhere would not think, ‘Oh, you’re going to need to be really high tech in your office.’ I had no idea because I’ve never lived off grid before. So, I didn’t know what to ask for.”
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