March | 2026 | Rhonda Ashurst Blog & Writing

**The Rock Stars**: Hyundai Ioniq 5, Nissan Ariya and 30 solar panels on the roof. Driving free on Nevada sunshine!

We have been on a quest to reduce our carbon footprint and green our life since 2019 when we installed our first set of solar panels and bought a used Nissan LEAF. Wow, have we come a long way since then! We are excited to have exceeded our goals while saving more money than we had expected (and it looks like we may save even more in the future as energy prices increase). Driving EV’s is thrilling, especially knowing that you are driving free on Nevada sunshine and emitting zero carbon! We also feel more comfortable in our home with our new HVAC systems, while saving money and natural gas. Going green has improved our lives on all levels and we have already broken even on our investment. We estimate we will save $84,000-$100,000 over the next 20 years that we intend to keep our home and our cars.

Here’s a table showing our average annual savings and other interesting stats:

Reduction in Our Carbon Footprint

We are thrilled to have made our goal of an over 50% reduction in our carbon footprint! A similar US household emits 50 tons of carbon dioxide per year, so at 19 tons, we emit about 62% less. Changes made: Driving all electric vehicles, installing 30 solar panels, replacing old water heater and HVAC with heat pumps, using zone heating, switching to LED lighting, eating less meat and dairy and more fruits and veggies. We used the Nature Conservancy calculator (https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon-footprint-calculator/) if you want to see what your carbon footprint is.

Annual $ Savings

I realized that I was not capturing the full value of our solar panels in my previous calculations. Now that we are using all the electricity we produce, our utility savings is a mix of the value of the electricity produced at current electrical rates + the value of the gas savings at current gas rates. We now use 63% less natural gas than we did in the past.

Our savings are likely to increase over time as the demand for electricity and natural gas increases, particularly with the growth in data centers to power AI. I recently read an article that projected a quadrupling of our energy demands in northern Nevada! It is expected that residential customers will be shouldering a portion of these costs through increased prices. If this happens, we could see the value of our panels increase significantly.

We save an average of about $3,000 per year by driving our EV’s. We expect that savings to increase over time as the EV’s age. They will require less R&M than their comparable gas vehicles and we anticipate that gas prices will trend up over the 20 years we hope to drive these vehicles, increasing that savings as well. For information on our EV savings and driving experience, see this post: https://rhondaashurst.com/2025/02/06/2023-and-2024-recap-of-driving-our-evs/.

Below is a breakdown of the total added home value and savings from the first table. I reference the savings I calculated when I did my last review in 2022. In that blog, I shared what we did in a lot more detail and offered suggestions if you want ideas for greening your own life (https://rhondaashurst.com/2023/03/05/year-4-its-all-coming-together/).

Between the annual savings of our systems, which all work in synergy with one another, we have saved $29,000 in 7 years! Our home value has increased by an estimated $34,000. For this calculation I took our estimated home value off Zillow and then multiplied by 5.5%. I based that on this article: https://www.energysage.com/news/solar-power-as-a-home-improvement-strategy/. I feel like the 5.5% is warranted given all the systems we have added to our home that increase its value by creating a stream of savings that will last for many years. That brings the total added value and savings to $63,000!

**Note:** We had a lot of help installing the heat pump systems from friends and family in the business. This saved us a lot of money. We also benefitted from tax rebates. We did choose high end EV’s which were more expensive. You can go all EV with cheaper used models, like we did with the LEAF, which was actually cheaper than the comparable ICE-the Juke.

The Financial Bottom Line

After only 7 years, we are over $8,000 ahead on our green investments. If we keep our house for the 20 years+ that we are planning, I estimate we will save somewhere between $84,000-$100,000! If we continue to save 20 tons of carbon per year, in 20 more years we will save over 400 tons of carbon from entering Earth’s atmosphere. Regardless of how you feel about climate change, this is a smart thing to do from a financial perspective. If we see the increase in energy prices that are currently being predicted, we may end up saving even more.

The Importance of Solar Panels

Adding all of these systems increases electricity use. We now use about 2.75 times more than we used in the past. Prior to 2019, we were using about 6800 kWh per year in our household. Now our household uses about 13,500, almost double. We also put about 5,000 kWh in our EV’s in 2025, for a total increase of 11,700 kWh. What saves money and carbon is using the solar panels to generate most of this increase. Some of the increase is due to caring for my elders, which involves a lot of driving (e.g. we provide my mother’s transportation and run all her errands). We think that our own personal use is about what we produce at this point, which was our goal.

Our gratitude to Travis and the guys at Great Basin Solar (https://www.greatbasinsolar.com/) for the awesome job they did designing and installing our system.

Xeriscaping Our Yard

We also xeriscaped our yard from 2013-2023, which reduced our water usage by about 1/3. We live in a dry climate where water is precious, so we decided to change our lawns into a beautiful variety of shrubs, flowers, pavers with pots and DG. We love our new yard and it is a lot easier to take care of!

For more information on this journey, see this theme: https://rhondaashurst.com/category/xeriscaping-our-yard/.

We started our heat pump journey with a hot water heater in April 2021, followed by a heat pump HVAC system in June 2022, and a master bedroom mini-split in June 2023. The main goals of these systems are to (1) reduce carbon emissions by using the solar we produce on our roof to efficiently heat and cool our home and produce hot water and (2) keep us comfortable in the areas of the house we use.

We’ve had these systems for a few years now and have learned a lot through experience. We have definitely accomplished our goals, but we use some of the systems differently than we anticipated and there is one system we would not purchase again for our particular home.

Here’s a little summary table of our systems:

The heat pump water heater is definitely our star! It cost the least and saves the most natural gas-235 therms. It works beautifully and even helps cool our garage in the summers (it puts the heat from the air into the water). We would definitely do it again!

The heat pump HVAC was our only disappointment. We had thought it would save electricity over our electric zone heaters, but it didn’t. Essentially we learned that it is not efficient at temperatures below 40 degrees. We originally set the heat pump to run at 35 degrees and above. We discovered we were using a lot of electricity and it was running all the time when it was cold. In milder temperatures, it works well to keep the whole house warm at a steady temperature. However, that uses more electricity than our zone heaters because the HVAC is a bigger unit and uses more power. We don’t use our whole house, staying mostly in the front rooms during the day which are farthest from the HVAC unit. We always felt a little chilly in those areas, so we ended up using our Zone heaters some in addition to the heat pump. This ate up about 1 megawatt of electricity that we are now saving by just using the Zone heaters. Now we use the heat pump HVAC only when temperatures are above 40 degrees to do the morning lift, mostly during shoulder seasons. (We turn down our thermostat to 62 at night and raise it to 68 when we get up.) This saves us about 15 therms of gas, so not enough to justify getting a heat pump again. We use it for A/C in the summer months during the day to cool the house, but at night we switch to the minisplit in our bedroom. In hindsight, we would have just replaced our old A/C unit with a newer one rather than getting the heat pump HVAC. In talking with our neighbors, they use their heat pumps a little differently than we do (see HVAC blog link below). Each situation is different and heat pumps can be the way to go, depending on the household.

The minisplit in our bedroom we use during hot summer nights to keep us cool and drown out the drag racing on the ring road near our home. It makes a lovely white noise and keeps us cool, while saving about 500 kWh of electricity over what we used to use when we had the HVAC cooling the whole house at night. Now that unit doesn’t run at all at night, except if we have company and want to keep them cool.

The Zone heaters are not heat pump technology, but efficient electric space heaters. We use an EdenPURE infrared copper heater in our dining room area during the day. Many days we don’t need it in the later afternoon. It keeps the area I work in at the dining room table and our kitchen warm, but the open design of our home means it also adds heat to the living room where Scott works. There is a Lopi gas stove in the living room, which I use in the mornings for my practice and we use in the evenings until we head to bed to read. It also holds the house at 62 degrees overnight so the main HVAC doesn’t come on at night-it only does the morning lift to 68 degrees. We use a Dyson heater in our bedroom when we are reading at night and it is chilly; Scott uses it in the mornings when he is reading while I’m doing my practice. We already had the Zone heaters, so they didn’t cost us anything and save us about 125 therms of gas. We have learned that zone heating and cooling is the way to go in our house, given how we use it.

Carbon and Cost Savings

Each therm of natural gas produces 12 pounds of CO2. So saving 385 therms saves 4,600 pounds of CO2. We pay about $0.50 per therm on average, so it saves about $193 per year off our NV Energy bill. We have decreased our gas use by 63%.

NOTE: It does take a lot of electricity to power these units and that is worth considering before installing them. Our household electricity usage has almost doubled, going from 6800 kWh annually to 13,500 kWh, a 6,700 kWh increase. Our solar panels generate the electricity we use for our household so it doesn’t cost us extra and reduces our carbon footprint. If we didn’t have the panels, we would be paying about $544 more per year (1 kWh=$0.11: 6700 kWh increase in electricity use X $0.11=$737-$193 gas savings=$544). We would also have increased our carbon footprint by 4,100 pounds (1 kWh=1.3 pounds: 6700X1.3=8,700-4,600 pounds saved in gas= 4,100). It really works best to use these systems in conjunction with solar panels.

Overall, we are very pleased with our systems and both agree we are now more comfortable in our home than we were before making these changes, plus we are saving both carbon and money!

For more detailed information about our heat pump systems–how they work, the installation process, cost breakdowns, how we and our neighbors use them, see these previous posts which have been updated:

Heat Pump Hot Water Heater: https://rhondaashurst.com/2021/04/25/our-new-hybrid-heat-pump-water-heater/

Heat Pump HVAC: https://rhondaashurst.com/2023/03/03/our-new-hybrid-split-heat-pump-system/

Mini-Split: https://rhondaashurst.com/2024/03/11/our-mini-split/