Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones and just a few more hours on the clock. Here’s some news that should help you get to 5pm:
Mill, the company that transformed grimy food recyclers into a sleek kitchen appliance, just launched a workplace version — meaning you no longer need to feel guilty about tossing the other half of your Sweetgreen bowl from Monday. Now it can become nutrient-rich dirt for your coworker’s garden. Employee contact form is in the link above.
Last edition: crickets, dog treats, dares.
This edition: weddings, solar panels, batteries.
🦴 Hot Bones is the weekly newsletter where you get personal solutions to a warming planet. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up for real here.
A few weeks after G and I got engaged, I looked in my inbox and saw this:
When I clicked into the spreadsheet, tabs upon tabs cascaded across my screen. Infinite rows, columns, pivot tables — enough to make any Goldman analyst go shaky at the knees. Some tabs were in all caps. Some were so long they transcended their cells, leaving to my imagination what could possibly come after “PRE WEEKEND EMAIL TO–”
It was the “don’t freak out but here’s all the stuff we’re going to need to figure out before the wedding” document, and I did indeed freak out for many hours despite the ✨✨ in the document title.
But I’ve got to hand it to G: She became an expert in every single tab. Not just local caterers and transportation recs, but napkin thread count, down-to-the-minute sunset times in the month of May, and the stark difference between chairs that are 16 inches high and those that are 18 inches high. If you asked her the maiden name of my mom’s college best friend sitting at table 7, she would still know.
(I had a few jobs, namely honeymoon bookings and finding “the nice port-o-potties with running water,” but I was mainly on moral support duty.)
The wedding went off without a hitch — one of the best days of my life — and now … we have all this wedding-related knowledge that’s pretty unusable. Anyone getting married in central Virginia in the month of May is more than welcome to use the ✨Gentle Master Wedding Spreadsheet✨ but honestly it’s just one of those things where you have to have gone through it to really understand what it’s like.
Along those lines, for the past few months I’ve been chatting with folks around Cville about their solar and backup battery setups — and it seems the same point holds true.
You can do all the research in the world, but to really understand what it’s like, you have to have someone climb on your roof and duck into your garage to install solar panels and connect backup batteries. And you have to do a lot of electrical and money math to figure out how long it’ll take for your upfront solar investment to pay for itself (average I’ve seen is 9-10 years in VA).
One day, G and I will have saved enough for our own set of panels and non-Tesla home batteries, but for now chatting with people like Tom and Joe and Dan have been super helpful to see what’s what when it comes to actually installing solar + storage.
Before diving in: The case for solar + storage
→ Energy from the sun is free and doesn’t burn fossil fuel.
→ The cost of solar installation is expensive (rough estimates are around 15k-26k upfront after the federal tax credit of 30%).
→ Adding home batteries is more expensive (conservatively speaking, expect to double that ^).
→ But the cost of both is way less than it used to be.
→ And now you can run your dryer during a blackout, all with clean energy from the sun that you don’t have to pay for.
+ As extreme weather becomes more, well, extreme, home resiliency feels more important to more people, plus you don’t have to pay increasing utility rates from Dominion.
If the upfront costs weren’t so big, solar + storage would be a no-brainer across the board. But currently, only some of us have our own gentle solar spreadsheets.
And now, meet your solar + storage neighbors
For the love of … horses 🐴
Dan and his wife are moving to the Shenandoah Valley because they found a cool farm for their horses. But the property sits between 2 utility companies and is literally where the electrical sidewalk ends. Getting hooked up to the grid would start at 80k. Dan was ready to bag it and find another property, but his wife convinced him they should go off-grid with solar + storage.
It would cost them around 70k. A high price tag (much higher than a grid-connected solar system), but it’s still 10k less than getting Shenandoah Valley Electric to run wires to their new house — and now they don’t have to pay monthly electric bills whatsoever. And no power outages.
IRA incentives: They’re planning on filing for the 30% tax credit for their solar panels and backup batteries this year. (Anyone who pays taxes is eligible for these incentives - let’s just hope they last into the Trump administration.)
Would have been nice to know earlier … “The biggest mistake I made was I joined a bunch of off-grid Facebook groups … and went down a lot of rabbit holes of complexity … I started reading [and] was like, ‘Oh my god, is this what I'm getting into?’”
Now, Dan recommends: “Sit down with some uninterested parties and understand the componentry.”
Worked with: Huffman Electrical Systems
For the love of … gaming
Tom lives in Charlottesville and decided to build a solar setup himself this fall (election panic, tariff spidey sense, great Black Friday deal). His roof doesn’t slope in the best direction for solar, so he built a pergola off the side and mounted panels there.
These two 400-watt panels power an EcoFlow Portable Power Station, aka a backup battery, that’s set up in his office to power his gaming setup.
“I have a really crazy gaming computer and a couple of monitors. And then I also have a TV plugged into it with Apple TV and a stereo receiver audio setup. And then I also charge my phone, iPad, my work laptop, all that stuff from the battery.”
At some point, he’s thinking of installing more solar panels in the yard and wiring-in a whole-home battery, but for now he’s good with the gaming system.
Coolest backup feature: Solar and backup batteries are expensive. “The nice thing about the EcoFlow stuff … it’s made to be more approachable.” Plus, the accompanying app is its own sort of game: “I’m looking at that thing constantly to see how much power is being generated.”
IRA incentives: Yes, filed the 30% incentive for 2024.
Worked with: Self install (helps to have a degree in computer engineering)
For the love of … resale value
Joe lives near Richmond and installed panels and home backup batteries last spring. With basically his entire roof covered, he can power his whole house and charge his EV. In fact, this past summer he was producing more energy than he was using — as in, zero-dollar statements from Dominion.
“I was getting an $8 charge for being connected to the grid,” he mentioned. “But I was also getting a $30 credit for selling solar renewable energy credits … Plus I was banking some electricity for the winter months.”
IRA incentives: Yes. “This year, with everything I’m going to be claiming back, it’s going to be pretty massive.”
Would have been nice to know earlier … “Everything I read about people trying to get a pay-back timeframe and number … the only thing they were putting into those equations was ‘how much is it going to lower my electric bill?’ A lot of people don’t realize that it’s going to improve the resale value of your house, especially as electricity probably is going to go up.
“The more data centers they build, the more attractive it’s going to be to say, ‘Hey, I don’t pay Dominion. They pay me.’”
Worked with: Virtue Solar
P.S. Joe checks on his panels with a drone. Super helpful this past winter with all the snow.
The final tab of the ✨gentle master solar spreadsheet✨
First of all, yes, all three of these interviews are with dudes. My working theory is that women in the area with solar + battery setups are on Reddit less and are also probably not interested in setting up a blind phone call with u/Objective_Wave_258. Let’s go #WomeninSTEM.
Secondly, as you probably noticed, solar + batteries can get super technical super fast. There’s an incredible amount of information out there, mostly written by engineers or government officials. I’ve found doing some background research on sites like EnergySage can give you good ballparks, and then chatting with a local expert for the nuances of your lifestyle, home, setup, etc. will help close the loop.
For example, recently I talked with Matt aptly named Powers, who founded Virtue Solar in Charlottesville over a decade ago.
He agreed that backup batteries don’t really help from an ROI standpoint (unless you’re aggressively selling power back to the grid, which is hard to do in VA). But they’re a big improvement to “quality of life, especially if you have young kids at home — if your power goes out with any sort of frequency, it can be a big headache.”
A customer’s backup system in Albemarle
“I was just at a customer’s house with batteries … One thing she was saying, one of the nice features of backup is when she loses power, the way that she knows is she can hear her neighbor’s generator running across the street — because the lights don’t go out, your clocks aren’t reset. The takeover is instant.”
Matt’s recommendation for solar in 2025:
“Someone today that is interested in solar, I would probably wait a month and see what happens in Congress, because … it sounds like they’re likely going to be altering or at least voting on the [30% federal] tax credit in April.”
“... I don’t actually think it’s going to disappear. And I definitely don’t think it would disappear before the end of this year … But I think that’s a relatively crucial thing to do … And then if there are changes, you would be aware of them.”
As of this week, tariffs are another big thing to watch out for. This one-two punch could add 2-3 years onto the payback for solar.
We also talked a lot about shifts in net metering, which made my head explode. It’s a topic that hits the grayscale trifecta of dull, vitally important, and incredibly confusing, in large part because utilities don’t want customers to understand what they’re doing. You can find a rabbit hole here.
More resources on solar + storage savings
💰 Federal 30% tax credit for solar and for batteries (you get your credit when you file your taxes, not upfront).
💰 Charlottesville has its own solar property tax credit, which is good for 5 years after installation. The city estimates that a house assessed at 300k with a 10k solar setup would earn $480 over those 5 years.
💰 Plus, there’s Virginia’s Solar Renewable Energy Credits that Joe was mentioning. These are a great example of how confusing electricity + finance can be, and every state is different. In Virginia, you can expect to earn roughly $390-$510 every year.
💰 There’s also Virginia’s Solarize program that starts up mid-April, where a vetted solar installer basically offers a group discount because a bunch of people are signing up at once. When I chatted with Rosina at the Energy Resource Hub, she estimated the Solarize rate is about 10-20% below market rate.
Enjoy the massive peach orchards right at the foot of Shenandoah National Park. I went last week and the blossoms were just getting going, so this weekend should be tops.
📍 Location: Jarmans Gap Road around the Chiles Peach Orchard.
🥪 Lunch: Greenwood Grocery (try the Blue Slate sandwich and grab a bottle of wine? hey it’s the weekend).
🪑 Thrifting nearby: Greenwood Antiques where G and I got 4 dining room chairs for $150. Total. Total not individual!
🚲 Or the max VO2 option: You can actually bike, run, or stumble your way up to the top of Skyline Drive from the orchard. 1,700 feet elevation in 3 miles on washed-out gravel. Maybe skip the wine and bring Gu instead.
🌥️ Hey so there’s this thing called solar? The next Climate Cafe is all about … going solar. This is a great opp to share ideas and get connected to trusted local resources like the new Energy Resource Hub (s/o Rosina!). See yall next Friday, April 11 from 9:30-11am.
☕ Meal of the week: Ethos is hosting a springtime floral tea tasting this Sunday from 1-4pm, which is not technically a meal but it is if you also order their pickle plate.
🚲 Big bike news: The quarterly drawing for a free $1,000 ebike voucher is officially open for Cville residents. Get your calf muscles ready with this Friday’s cruiser ride from Endeavor Cycles to Hogwaller Brewing — “party pace” starts at 6pm.
🐶 Pet of the week: Blossom! Tricolor shepherd mix with amazing caterpillar white eyebrows. Super social, great with kids and other dogs (5 months, 25 lbs).
💪 And you thought the Trader Joe’s parking lot was already crowded: Cville’s Hands Off! peaceful protest is this Saturday from 1-2pm at the Shops at Stonefield (where the proposed Tesla dealership would go).
🐀 Long-read of the week: Sanitation workers went on strike in the UK city of Birmingham, leading to 3 weeks of hot garbage and “rat’s heaven.” Click for the pics, stay for the lesson in the importance of recycling and waste disposal services.
💼 Job of the week: Solar Operations & Maintenance Technician at Tiger Solar — responsible for repairing and maintaining already installed solar systems (based in Cville, $24/hr).
