Episode 100! You Don't Need Permission to Use Solar: Mr. Money Mustache
In This Week In Solar’s one hundredth episode, Aaron Nichols sits down with Mr. Money Mustache [https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/].
They dive into the unnecessary red tape surrounding traditional solar installations and explore some highly unconventional, DIY ways to capture the sun’s energy without asking for permission.
Pete became an internet legend under the pseudonym Mr. Money Mustache. By optimizing his spending, earning, and investing (and always maximizing for fun while minimizing cost), Pete managed to retire at the age of 30.
Pete is also a self-proclaimed “eco-nerd” who loves harnessing the free magic energy from the sky that is solar power.
You can listen to this episode here, or on:
* YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@ThisWeekInSolar]
* Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-solar/id1812459488]
* Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/6KBALbb3w1Dc864mbdM7P1]
Expect to learn:
* How Pete bypassed city permits by buying cheap used solar panels on Craigslist and wiring them directly into his electric water heater for free hot water.
* Why solar is so expensive in the United States compared to countries like Germany and Australia (hint: it’s mostly administrative red tape).
* Pete’s wild DIY trick using a $20 farmer’s bucket heater and a direct solar connection to turn his hot tub into a 120-degree cauldron of free, sun-powered hot water.
* How to make sure you’re working with a reputable, locally owned solar installer like Exact Solar [https://exactsolar.com/].
Quote from the episode:
“It takes very little resources to manufacture a solar panel... You put it in the sun, it's paid back its manufacturing costs within something like three months in terms of the embodied energy. And then it's like 30 more years of profit that you're helping the earth.”
— Pete (Mr. Money Mustache)
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols Hey guys, a quick note before today’s episode with Mr. Money Mustache. Pete, who I interview, has a huge risk tolerance. He’s known for doing out-there things and he’s gonna describe some things that are pretty unsafe. Now, if you are interested in putting solar on your home, consult with qualified professionals. Electricity is no joke. You can really hurt yourself and we would hate to see that. So, please talk to us at X-ACC Solar if you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, if you’re thinking of putting solar on your home, and do not go messing around with the electricity in your own home unless you have qualifications. Now, without further ado, enjoy today’s interview with Mr. Money Mustache.
Aaron Nichols Pete, I know you as Pete. The world knows you as Mr. Money Mustache. Not too long ago, you asked me to help you break down the solar energy system you’d put on your roof and you’d done something really unique with it. So I’d like to launch into that story.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh yeah. Sure. Okay. So the background is that I’m an electrical guy in the past, like an electrical engineer, and I’ve done wiring, full houses. So I’m comfortable with all your electricity stuff. But what I don’t like is a lot of red tape and permits and high fees that usually comes with solar, especially like the city we’re in right now, Longmont, is a little bit solar unfriendly compared to some other cities. So I just had a bunch of solar panels that I got off of Craigslist and I wired them up and really just chucked them onto my roof. I didn’t even mount them. I just made like a little metal frame and set them in there. And then I ran that DC current right into an electric water heater. And because of the principles of electricity, a heating element doesn’t care whether you’ve done gone through a fancy inverter and made AC or not, it’s just like solar panels right into the water heater and then I got free hot water for like a year and a half total cost of like just the cost of the solar panels on Craigslist so maybe like $800 of solar panels and I made about $400 of electricity with them in just the first, like per year I guess. So it’s like a giant return on investment compared to these systems where you spend many thousands of dollars in order to save like a little bit more per year. But it takes like sometimes 15 or 20 years to pay it back.
Aaron Nichols So for anyone who doesn’t know, I mean you have written online and published all sorts of stuff about how to financially and how otherwise optimize your life. Would you just give the audience an overview of who you are, what you’re about.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, okay, that’s a bigger story. I, on the internet, I write as Mr. Money Mustache, although my real identity is not a secret either. And the basic idea is I like to optimize everything, maximizing for fun, preferably at minimal cost, especially when I was younger, when I didn’t have a lot of money. So what that led to is optimizing my whole spending and earning and investing. And it led to me being able to retire when I was 30 years old, just in time to start raising a child, get married, raising a kid and now I’ve been retired for like almost 22 years because I’m like coming up on 52 years old so it’s just been like a giant fun story of freedom and then I decided to start writing about this at some point and that’s where the Mr. Money Mustache blog was born.
Aaron Nichols Yeah and you’ve been a big fan of solar for a long time I mean the building we’re sitting in now which for anyone who doesn’t know you own this building it’s like half co-working space half community center yeah and it is powered by the Sun.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah somewhat like it’s a grid-tied solar system and during the summer it makes more electricity than we use and during the winter it runs a deficit so we have to pay a power bill and pull it out of the grid.
Aaron Nichols So why are you such a fan of solar?
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Just because it’s magic free energy from the sky. It’s like raining the equivalent of money down onto you everywhere on earth. So why wouldn’t you want to harvest it? It just seems super cool to me.
Aaron Nichols Yeah. I remember, I mean, you’re actually one of the reasons I wound up in the solar industry was reading your story of how you actually got solar on this building.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh, I didn’t know that.
Aaron Nichols Yeah. This was years ago before I was still a vagabond just traveling before I decided to do the installer training that I did and everything that took me here I was just like my god he made solar sound so cool.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah well thanks. Yeah. And I also like it because I’m a closet eco nerd as well right like I care about the environment I don’t like pollution so anytime I can displace fossil fuels with clean energy I like that too. But if you do it with the right little tweaks on how you do it it can be more profitable and less hassle and that’s also what I like.
Aaron Nichols So let’s talk about ways that people can use this amazing technology without permission and also how they can be safe doing so.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Yeah. Some of the stuff I do is not always safe.
Aaron Nichols I’ve been with you for some of those experiences.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Like when we took the tree down to the coworking space.
Aaron Nichols Oh yeah. Some big heavy stuff falling down.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. I’m a little bit of a honey badger. I might have used up a couple of my nine lives if I were a cat. So don’t exactly do what I do, but you can choose the things that are safe. So what I would recommend... What first comes to mind with today’s solar environment is you buy one of those like all-in-one solar generator battery units, have dropped in price so much. Your solar panels go straight into that and it’s just got a bunch of plugs on the front. And if you get a big enough one, you can have thousands of watts of solar going in there and thousands of watts coming out to power all your stuff, like your hot tub and your electric car and anything else that uses a lot of power. And it can be completely off grid. So you don’t need a permit to do it. And that’s the easiest way to get comfortable and have some fun with solar. And then you can scale up from there. And then there’s like the new laws, which you might mention in this podcast that allow you to have like a mini grid tide system, right?
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Then of course, if you have a big enough house and a big enough budget, then it starts to shift over to become profitable to do the big array and make it grid tied. And that’s what we did here at this building because I really wanted it to make a surplus of power and then, you know, get credits that last through the seasons.
Aaron Nichols Yeah. Big fan of the battery option, just getting a little battery and plugging appliances into it because power’s just getting more and more expensive. Like you said, those things are cheap and that’s such a great option, especially for, let’s say, renters who don’t own their home. They don’t have the option to put solar on their roofs, but their bills just keep going up and up. There’s nothing stopping you. And it’s not even dangerous from buying a solar panel on Craigslist, buying a battery bank on Craigslist and plugging your refrigerator into it. Yeah, and the cool thing is, especially I moved from Longmont to Denver, in Denver we have time of use pricing and from 5 to 9 p.m. each day the price triples just for those few hours. So you can do tricks like have one of those batteries on a little timer, even if you didn’t have solar it could just charge from the grid and then it flips off the power supply at 5 o’clock and then your fridge runs from 5 to 9 on cheap power and then it recharges itself after hours, simplest system of all. We can later like put in the show notes or something exactly how this would work. So that’s level one. Or if you plug some solar panels into that low cost battery, then you don’t even have to charge it from the grid. Anytime you have time of use pricing, then it becomes like typically at least twice as valuable to do some solar tricks, right? Because you’re displacing the more expensive power.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Right.
Aaron Nichols And you powered your hot tub as well, you said, with that same system that you were using for your water heater.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, it was kind of similar. Not exactly. But what I did is I bought this what’s called a bucket heater. You can buy these things on Amazon. They’re like $20 and typically they’re used by farmers. It looks like a curling iron, but it’s meant to be dunked into water and you plug it into an AC plug. And it just heats up a five gallon bucket of water for like farm use or whatever. But it turns out if you leave one of those plugged in and dunked in your hot tub, it’ll heat the whole thing up just fairly slowly and just like any resistive heater you can run it on AC or DC, right? So I had my bank of 12 solar panels on my roof running down, I put like a normal household plug on the end of those wires and I just plugged in this farmer bucket heater and it was actually a little bit overpowered so it was putting out a little bit more than it was supposed to which is still safe because it’s underwater and it would heat the whole hot tub sometimes like in the right season I would get home and my hot tub would be like 120 degrees wow like I’d actually have to cool it down before I got in it’s just like a giant cauldron and make some soup in there. So that was fun because you know hot tubs are fun all the time. But they’re even more fun if you know that it was heated by the Sun that day.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, this is what I love about solar energy man is that there’s like obviously we have these big utility scale solar farms and those are cool in their own way, but just like the creative stories I hear from people like yeah, Keely my wife and I. Shortly after we got married to celebrate she bought me a yurt trip and we snowshoed in in January to a yurt up north of Fort Collins like three miles in and the whole thing was powered by solar and a big Blue Eddy battery bank. So you had your fireplace and you could just grab dead wood from outside, warm yourself with the fireplace and then you had string lights to charge your devices or you know light to play UNO by in the night or...
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It’s amazing. It is fun. If you happen to appreciate it, like most people do, it just feels more magical to just think about the electricity you’re using and how it shone from the sky onto you and then you’re using it that night.
Aaron Nichols So what I know that you’re a big fan of reducing waste in general and you also talk a lot on your show about how the average American just wastes so much. So what mindset do you think needs to change for people to get on board more with solar?
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Well, I like it to be... Like people have to know how simple it is. And like there’s still a lot of misconceptions because solar is still a bit of a political topic in the U.S. Right. So people have been brainwashed into thinking that it’s not good or it’s not cost saving or that there’s some hidden environmental damage that you’re not seeing and then you’re only seeing the nice part of it. But like none of that is true. It is just purely all good. It takes very little resources to manufacture a solar panel in it. You put it in the sun, it’s paid back its manufacturing costs within something like three months in terms of the embodied energy. And then it’s like 30 more years of profit that you’re helping the earth. So I think the main thing is just... people of all types, you know, and all political persuasions and all different audiences should just get to know it and share it with their audiences or share it with your friends if you’re not a content creator or whatever. And the word should spread. But I think the real key is it has to be simple because with the salesman that comes to your door with a clipboard and tries to sell you like $25,000 overpriced sale, like overpriced solar system, that makes everybody think it’s complicated and expensive, which it doesn’t have to be.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, well and a lot of that I mean as someone who works for a solar installer so much of the cost is permitting.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, it’s the labor to get the labor and time to get paperwork through local bureaucracy.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, and multiple inspections and they want you to change your work, right?
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It was already done. Well the first time right like unnecessary structural things.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, the panels are lightweight.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Just bunch of junk like that.
Aaron Nichols I was having a conversation about this with someone last night at one of the Colorado climate week off. And we were talking about how, you know, there’s countries that have streamlined the process. Like Germany is an example. Australia is an example where there’s a national process and it’s much easier to go solar and therefore solar costs a lot less. But here in the States, it basically comes down to local egotism. It’s like people saying, well, our process is way too important for us to streamline. We have to do stormwater and we have to do all this stuff. And but yet there’s people who have done it.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah I know well people who work for cities and building departments like they don’t always have the same incentives. Right. Like if they were paid based on how many solar systems got installed or even how happy the homeowners are about the solar system, about the policies, then they would have different incentives and they’d do a better job. Right now, their incentive is just to keep their jobs. Which is like, well, okay, you tell me what rules to enforce and I’ll enforce them really well. That’s how I keep my job, which is obviously gonna lead to some shitty types of customer experiences when we’re the customer.
Aaron Nichols If you wanted to, let’s say, leave the audience with just a quick tip for anyone who wants to get started tomorrow, save some money with Solar. I think we might have already covered it, but you’ve done so much of this.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah, would buy... I wouldn’t do the DC hot water thing that I did or anything like that. If you have a hot tub, then the curling iron solution could work and we could include a diagram of how to do it because that’s not too dangerous. But if you really want to be safe, just buy a portable generator, as they call that, like a solar generator, which is really just a battery pack with a solar input and then various outputs. Buy one of those and you can get like a pretty big one, like a one kilowatt hour one off Amazon for about three hundred dollars now. It used to be a thousand dollars. And then you just buy some solar panels on Craigslist. So don’t buy the solar panels of the same brand like Blue Ready or whatever, because they’ll be hundreds of dollars for like just a few hundred watts of panels. You buy them on Craigslist where it’s like 50 bucks for a 200 to 300 watt panel. As long as you have a place to set that out in your driveway or a balcony or wherever else, then you’re immediately producing a lot of power. Then... How much you save is a little bit debatable because, you know, it depends on how much you spend on the equipment, how sunny it is where you live, how much the power costs where you live, but it’ll definitely be fun regardless of what you do.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) And then the savings come when you start to have more solar panels that are going into a big load that typically uses a lot of electricity, which is why I went straight to heating because heat takes tons of energy. So anytime you can heat your house or some water, then you don’t need storage. It’s just going to the water and that’s when the numbers start to add up to like significant dollars that people might care about.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I have a solar panel and a battery bank. I use them when I’m camping, but I will occasionally like plug our little toaster oven into the battery bank when we’re just heating up bagels. And you’re not going to save much, right? Like your toaster oven, even though that’s a high wattage device, it’s still only using 10 to 15 cents an hour of electricity. Like a bunch of dimes don’t really add up very fast.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) True but it’s that mental just I didn’t have to pay for this.
Aaron Nichols Yeah and so that’s really nice.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) I actually enjoy that so much that I’m still gonna do it anyway.
Aaron Nichols Right.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It all depends on you know start small and learn and then you can always go bigger later as well.
Aaron Nichols Yeah so I’m very excited to ask you this last question because I’ve read your blog for so long and I know that you’re also like an urban planning enthusiast and kind of a futurist in some ways but I ask everyone who comes on this show the same closing question. I thought of it when I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party last year. After speaking at her birthday party, I realized that 80 years means that my grandma was born into a world where what we call renewable energy effectively didn’t exist. The whole journey of solar PV basically from the invention of the cell to it being the cheapest power source in the world now happened within my grandma’s lifetime. Before that, like we had basically barely figured out how to harness electricity. The only way we knew how to make it was just digging stuff up, bringing it to a central place and burning it and sending it out.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Oh, we did have, um, how old is hydropower with electric dams and stuff?
Aaron Nichols Think that’s getting close to as, as a world as electricity itself.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) It is. Yeah.
Aaron Nichols But the question I ask everyone who comes on, so knowing that we’ve seen so much change in the last 80 years and we’ve gone from within one person’s lifetime not having this to it now being the most effective way to generate electricity. What do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh, I think it’s going to be pretty abundant because there’s no way it’s going to get more expensive. It’s not like in the old days when I worried about peak oil and we’re like, oh, the oil is going to run out and then we’re going to, it’s good. The price is going to go up and it’s going to be terrible. It’s only going to get cheaper. The sun’s not going anywhere. So it’s gonna, I think you’ll just see more abundant electricity at lower prices and then we’ll think of more fun stuff to do with it. Like hot tubs for everybody. And like obviously electric cars, will eventually be electric airplanes as the batteries get higher density. And of course now with AI data centers, we’ve thought of lots of ways to burn tons of electricity too. So thank goodness solar arrived just in time for that because we’re gonna need like many gigawatts of that generation as well.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, you’re lucky you retired before AI.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Oh yeah, because it would make me obsolete.
Aaron Nichols Maybe, yeah, I don’t know.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) But I feel that people... people who are in technology and also understand how to use AI, their worth is getting magnified because it’s basically you have a bunch of workers that work for you and you command this army of super intelligent robots. Yeah. And so the people who have mastered that are making more money than ever and being more productive than ever.
Aaron Nichols I’ve heard of this. It’s like bring your own software, bring your own agents to your next job.
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Where you don’t want to be is like, you know, a customer, a telephone customer service representative, because an AI already can do better than that, even with the voice. That can even have the voice. There will be some jobs displaced, every past generation of technology has always just created more jobs, even while it erased obsolete jobs. So I think that’ll be true with AI too. We’ll see.
Aaron Nichols Well, where do you like to be found if you do want to be found? Online or otherwise?
Mr. Money Mustache (Pete) Yeah. Well, online is good since we’re creating a podcast right now. So just Mr. Money Mustache, if you look me up. You’ll find my website. You’ll find any other stuff that I’ve done. And if you’re local to Colorado and the Denver area, then you can always, you could even see where we’re hanging out right here, which is the PHI collective. PHI stands for financial independence. And it’s our social club and coworking space where we have now like about a hundred members who live around here and socialize and work together and stuff. So this is the real thing that’s... That’s more fun is in person socializing rather than just online.
Aaron Nichols Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and for coming on and for everyone listening. That’s been this week in solar. I’m honored to be a guest next week.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com [https://exactsolar.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
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