Report FAQs

What do you need from me?

Four things: your postcode, what you heat your home and your water with today, which upgrades you want costed — heating and cooling, hot water, driving, or all three — and an email address to send the report to. If driving is one of them we also need your annual mileage, because mileage dominates that result and two households with the same car can differ threefold.

Two follow-ups depend on those answers and make the figures sharper rather than being required: the year, make and model of the car you drive now and the one you are considering. Whether you already have solar is part of the first two questions rather than a separate one.

Do you need my utility bill?

No, and we do not ask for one. Your home's energy use is modelled from your climate zone and the equipment you named, rather than calibrated to a bill total. That is a real trade-off, not a free lunch: a year of real usage would pin your baseline down more tightly than a climate profile does.

We decided it was not worth what it costs you. Twelve months of usage, or a utility login, is a large thing to hand over for a modest gain on a figure that is an estimate either way. So the collection list in the privacy policy is exhaustive and short: no bills, no utility account number or login, no name, no street address, no phone number, no income.

Does it use my local energy rates?

Yes, and your postcode is the single most load-bearing thing you tell us. It resolves which utility serves you, which electricity schedule your figures are priced on, what a therm of gas and a gallon of petrol cost in that territory, and which of three climate zones your heating load is calculated in.

Every rate is a published figure, in effect on 2026-06-01, with its source shown on the methodology page. A postcode we cannot resolve is refused rather than defaulted to San Francisco: a report confidently about the wrong city would be wrong in every figure and would say so nowhere.

How does it model my home's energy use?

It breaks the home into distinct end-uses — heating and cooling, water heating, everyday base load like lights and appliances, and driving — then applies each technology at its real-world efficiency. A heat pump moves roughly 3–4 units of heat per unit of electricity, against a gas furnace that burns a therm to deliver noticeably less than a therm of heat into the room.

What it compares against is the equipment you told us you have, in your climate zone, at the in-use efficiency of equipment of about that age — not a national average household. Where we had to assume something, the report's assumptions table says so and marks the row as ours rather than yours.

Does it account for seasonal changes?

Yes, month by month, because the loads and the prices are both seasonal and correlated, and flattening either one into an annual average quietly moves the answer. A heat pump is least efficient in the coldest months, which are exactly the months the heating load peaks. Coastal cooling peaks in September rather than July. Both show up in the result instead of being smeared across the year.

How are the savings and the payback worked out?

The saving is your modelled annual energy cost now against your modelled annual energy cost afterwards, at your rates and your usage.

The payback is deliberately not the full price of the new equipment divided by that saving. It runs on the difference between replacing what you have with another gas appliance and replacing it with the electric one, because a water heater at the end of its life is going to be replaced with something either way. The gross figures for both paths are printed in the assumptions table so you can check that is what we did.

Ask about more than one upgrade and each gets its own saving and its own payback in a table, rather than being blended into a whole-home average. They do not pay back at the same speed, and it is entirely normal for one to be clearly worth doing while another is not.

Are incentives counted?

No. Zero is assumed and nothing is netted off, so every payback the report prints is the pessimistic version and anything you qualify for is upside. Federal, state, utility and local programmes change often and run out of funding, and a figure printed here would be out of date before you read it.

Ask us instead — by reply to the report, or at info@electrifynow.io — and we will look up what is currently available where you live and send you what we find. That is research on the day, not a promise that the money is there.

How is solar handled?

Solar production is netted against your home's electricity use first and then against your car charging, month by month, rather than taken as a blanket percentage off a bill. That keeps it tied to when the sun is actually producing.

Every technology in the report carries two figures: what it saves on grid electricity, and what it saves if you generate your own. Solar changes the ranking of these upgrades often enough that printing only one of those would mislead you.

Is this a quote?

No, and nothing in it should be read as one. Nobody has been to your house. Running costs are modelled from published rate schedules; upfront costs are our own installed-cost estimates, carried as ranges, and they assume no electrical panel upgrade and no major duct replacement — either of which can add thousands.

Take the report to two or three contractors and get real bids. Putting you in a stronger position in that conversation is the whole point of it. What we will not do is make the introduction: we take no money from installers, there is no referral network, and nobody is called or emailed about your house except you. The terms set out what this site looked like back when that was not true.

Where do you serve?

Pacific Gas & Electric territory today — 1,227 of California's 2,654 postcodes. The rest of the state is coming and is not ready yet.

The postcode lookup already covers every Californian postcode, and the rates for Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, SMUD and LADWP are built and cited. What has not happened is a person checking a report for one of those households from end to end, so those postcodes are refused rather than quietly served a report nobody has verified. If yours is one of them, write to us and we will tell you that plainly instead of sending you something we do not yet stand behind.

What does it cost, and what happens to my answers?

Pay what you think it was worth once you have read it, and nothing is a real option. There is no price, no suggested amount, and nothing asked for up front.

Your answers and your email address are deleted 30 days after your report is sent, automatically, whether or not you ask. They are never sold or shared — not to installers, not to anyone. The detail is in the privacy policy, and the privacy rights page is how you have anything we hold removed sooner.