Upload a California electric bill and see your real annual usage in kWh, your rate, and how the year breaks down. Free, no signup, no phone call.
Your bill is read by our reader and is not stored by it. The image is used to pull out the figures and is not written to disk or kept afterwards. We do keep the usage figures, the file, and the account details printed on it, so a rep can match your bill to your quote. We do not use your information for anything else.
Competing quotes from vetted installers, priced against the number above rather than a guess.
Get my quotesMost California electric bills print a 13-month usage chart. Where that chart is readable the analyzer measures the bars and reports your actual year, which is the best number available short of pulling interval data from your utility.
Where there is no chart, or it covers less than a full year, it takes the billing periods it can see and projects the rest from the seasonal usage pattern for your ZIP code. That is an estimate, it is labelled as one, and it comes with a range.
It never multiplies a single month by twelve. That is the usual shortcut and it is wrong in both directions depending which season you are in: a July bill overstates a Bay Area year and understates an Inland Empire one.
Same bill, opposite error.
Southern California Edison, SDG&E, PG&E, LADWP, SMUD and Anaheim Public Utilities. PG&E sends scanned bills with no text layer, so those are read with optical character recognition, which takes a little longer.
If your utility is not on that list the analyzer will say so rather than guess at the numbers. A wrong usage figure is worse than no figure, because it quietly sizes a system wrong.
Solar is sized against how much electricity you use in a year, not against your monthly bill in dollars. Two homes with identical bills can need very different systems, because rates differ by utility, by rate plan and by how much you use at peak times.
A kilowatt-hour is one unit of electricity. Your bill prints how many you used and what you paid for them. The count is the part that survives a rate change.
Yes, and there is no signup. You do not enter an email to see your result, and nobody calls you.
It goes to our reader, which pulls the figures off it and keeps nothing. Reading it there rather than in your browser is what makes a phone photo of a bill work. We keep the file and the usage figures to make the reader more accurate, and we do not use your information for anything else.
Where the bill carries a full 12-month chart the figure is measured, not estimated. From a partial history accuracy improves quickly with the number of months on the bill, and the page shows you the range and how much of the year it actually observed.
PG&E sends a scanned image rather than a text PDF, so it has to be read with character recognition. That downloads a language model the first time and takes roughly ten seconds a page.