OK - just got my wattbox today, and plan on getting my electrician over shortly to get it installed. But I'm still not sure what I'm doing here, so maybe someone can help me -
We have had PV on the house for many years, and are grandfathered in on an old PGE rate E6(?) - essentially its tiered with 2 time periods. noon to 6pm, and 6pm to noon. Everything was great, and then I got my Rav4. We still did ok, we have been replacing a bunch of our lighting with LED, and the boys went off to college, so our electric bill went up, but was still extremely reasonable. Then we got a second Rav4 for my wife, and now we are realizing our electric bills have gone thru the roof - her work, which had said they were going to put in a charge station has backed down, and we can't add to our existing solar array (Solar City won't even return my call) and PG&E can offer extremely little information about our usage - so much for "smart" meters.
So on this grandfathered rate we are using enough to push our off peak up to the highest rate, which is like .26 - so I ordered the wattbox to see what we really use for the cars and what we can do -
So I'm looking for advice - do I sign up all our service for the EV-A, which has more tiers, but has an off peak max of under .10, or do I try for some submeter rate for charging the vehicles, or is there some other option - like a secondary solar array with microinverters. I hate to say it, but even the people at eMotorwerks weren't reallly able to explain how to go about evaluating all this, or even what the WattBox would really do for me, but I figured at the very least it would give me more info on just what I am using to charge our vehicles. I am frustrated that all this requires such an huge investment in time and effort to try to make heads or tails of all the plentiful but poorly explained options -
If anyone has a better grasp of this, and can offer any advice, or even point me to resources to get the information to do the analysis - I'd really appreciate it -