Personal analysis

The same arithmetic, run on your house

The graphs on this site describe an average San Francisco single-family home. Averages are a good place to start and a bad place to finish. Your climate zone, your utility, the equipment you already own and how far you drive are all specific, and the answer changes a lot when the inputs do.

So you tell us a postcode, what you have today and what you are thinking of changing, and we email you a report built on those answers. It is a generated PDF: the arithmetic, the charts and the summary under each chart are all computed from what you sent, by the same code that produced the sample reports and the figures on this site.

That is the claim rather than an apology for it. A number produced by code whose workings are published is a number you can check, and two households that send the same answers get the same report. What a person does is read your email, run it, and look at the output before it reaches you — which is the part that catches a figure that came out wrong.

Where we can do this today

Pacific Gas & Electric territory — 1,227 of California's 2,654 postcodes. Not just San Francisco, and not yet the whole state.

The postcode lookup covers every Californian postcode, and the rates for Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, SMUD and LADWP are built and cited alongside PG&E's. What has not happened is a person checking a report for one of those households from end to end, so the code refuses those postcodes rather than serving a report nobody has verified. The rest of California is coming for that reason and no other.

If your postcode is one of them, ask anyway. The form takes it, recognises the utility and tells you so on the spot: your request is accepted and flagged for the extra check, and it will take longer than two business days. That is more use than either a refusal or a report we do not yet stand behind.

What you get

A PDF, landscape, built to be read on a screen or printed and taken to a contractor. Here is what is in it. The report FAQs go into how each figure is built.

  1. Four futures for your house, side by side

    What you spend on energy now; what it costs to run if you replace what you have with more gas equipment; what it costs if you electrify; and what it costs if you electrify and generate your own power. Each path carries its extra cost on day one and the payback on that difference — not on the full price of new equipment, because you were going to replace a dying water heater with something regardless.

  2. Where your energy money goes today

    Your spend broken into heating and cooling, hot water, everyday base load, and driving, modelled from your climate zone and the equipment you named. This is the baseline everything else is measured against, so it is shown rather than assumed.

  3. What energy costs you, and what it delivers

    The price of a kilowatt-hour, a therm and a gallon on your utility's own published schedules, and how much useful heat each dollar actually buys once equipment efficiency is applied. It is where the saving comes from, and it is checkable against your own bill even though we never asked to see it.

  4. A row per technology, with its own payback

    If you ask about more than one upgrade, each one gets its own annual saving, its own payback period and its own figure with solar. They do not pay back at the same speed, and a blended whole-home average hides the thing you most need to know — that it is normal for one of these to be clearly worth doing while another is not.

  5. A written summary under every chart

    Not a caption explaining how to read the chart, but a sentence or two about what your numbers mean, computed from them. It is written to say the unflattering thing when the unflattering thing is true: if an upgrade loses you money at your rates, the summary says so in those words rather than calling a loss a saving.

  6. Incentives: zero assumed

    Nothing is netted off anywhere in the report, so every payback in it is the pessimistic version and anything you qualify for is upside. Programmes change and run out of funding, so rather than print a figure that expires, we will research what is currently available where you live when you ask and send you what we find.

  7. Every assumption, with its source

    A table of what went into it: your answers, our estimates, each row marked as one or the other, with the gross costs printed so you can check that the payback really did run on the difference. Rates carry their effective date and link back to the methodology page.

What is not in it

An electrical panel load calculation. This page used to promise one, and it was never built. It would also need a photo of the inside of your panel, which is not on the list of things the privacy policy says we collect — and that list changes before the product does, not after.

So the upfront costs in your report assume no panel upgrade and no major duct replacement. On an older house that is the assumption most likely to be wrong, and either one can add thousands. The report says so on its face rather than in fine print, and it is the first thing worth asking a contractor about.

Turnaround, price and privacy

Turnaround
Within two business days Generating it takes seconds. The wait is one person reading your email, running it and checking the output. If that is going to take longer, you will hear that rather than silence.
Price
Pay what you can Including nothing. The report is the same either way, and we do not ask before we write it.
Your data
Never sold or shared Not to installers, not to anyone. No referrals, no introductions, no lead fees. Deleted 30 days after your report is sent.

This page said five business days until recently, which was padding. It made sense when a person was writing the analysis; it does not now that the model runs in seconds, and quoting a delay longer than the work takes is a small dishonesty on a site whose only product is being straight with you. Two days is the honest shape of the remaining constraint, which is a human getting to your email.

On paying what you can

Pay what you think it was worth, after you have read it — and nothing is a real option. There is no suggested amount here, no tiers, and no "most people give" line, because those are all ways of applying pressure while claiming not to.

Two honest reasons for doing it this way. The first is independence: the moment this site earns money from installers, its advice starts bending toward whatever installers want to sell, and you would have no way of telling. Being paid by the person reading the report is the only arrangement where our interests and yours point the same direction. The second is that we genuinely do not know what this work is worth yet. Watching what people choose to pay is how we find out.

If the report tells you that electrifying does not pay for your house, that is a useful answer and we would rather write it than not. It is also, obviously, the kind of answer a business paid on commission never gives you.

On your privacy

We do not sell or share your personal information. Full stop. Not your email address, not your postcode, not your answers, and not an anonymised or aggregated version of any of it.

This site used to operate differently: it passed homeowner details to installers in exchange for a fee. That business is over, and this is the part of the change that matters most. What you send us is used to generate your report and for nothing else, and it is deleted 30 days afterwards automatically — if you want it gone sooner, ask and it will be.

We also keep the list of what we ask for deliberately short: no name, no street address, no phone number, no utility login, no bills. Anything we do not hold cannot be leaked, subpoenaed, or sold by whoever owns this site after us. The details are in our privacy policy.

How to request one

The form is below. Four required questions, plus three about driving that only appear if driving is one of the things you tick — and every one of them is an input to the arithmetic. There is nothing on it asking whether you own or rent, nothing asking for a phone number, and no box to tick agreeing to be contacted by an installer — those were qualifying questions asked on somebody else's behalf, and there is no longer anybody to qualify you for.

This page said there is no form on this page until recently and asked you to send the same answers as an email, which the early requests have now taught us the shape of. The mailbox has not gone anywhere: info@electrifynow.io is read by a person, and an email with these answers in it works exactly as well as the form. The form is faster for you and stops us mistyping a postcode.

What it asks, and why each one

  • Your postcode. It sets your utility, your rates and your climate zone, and it is the single most load-bearing thing you tell us.
  • What you have today — how you heat the house, how you heat your water, what you drive, and whether you already have solar. Without this we would credit you with replacing equipment you do not own.
  • Which upgrades you actually want costed — space heating, water heating, driving, or all three. If you arrived here from one of the technology pages, that is the one to tick.
  • An email address to send the PDF to.
  • Your annual mileage, if driving is one of them. The form only asks when it is, because mileage dominates that section and two households with the same car can differ threefold. A fleet average would describe a typical household in the one part of the report where you know your own number.

Useful if you have it, not required: the year, make and model of the car you drive now and the one you are considering — we look both up at the EPA for their real combined figures, and where we cannot, the report marks that row as an estimate rather than printing an average as though it were your car.

Please do not send us your bills, your utility login or a photo of your panel. We do not use them, and the privacy policy says we do not collect them, so the only thing sending them achieves is putting data in our inbox that should never have been there.

Request a report

Five digits. Outside Pacific Gas & Electric territory your request is still accepted — you will be told so plainly, and why it takes longer, rather than being turned away or quietly served a report nobody has checked.

What you have today *

Tick what is already electric. Anything you tick stops the report crediting you with an upgrade you have already made — while keeping its running cost in today's spend, so the rest is measured against your real baseline.

What you want costed *

Each one you tick gets its own annual saving, its own payback and its own figure with solar. Pick at least one of the first three: solar is priced as a lens over an upgrade rather than as an upgrade of its own, so there is no report to build for solar by itself.

Only if you ticked driving

An estimate to the nearest thousand is plenty. We ask rather than assume because this one number dominates the driving result.

Year, make and model. We look it up at the EPA; if we cannot find it, the report uses the published fleet average and marks that row as an estimate.

Where the PDF goes, and the only handle we have on your record. Deleted 30 days afterwards, and never added to a mailing list — there is no mailing list.

Nothing to pay now or later unless you decide the report was worth something. No sales call and no installer introduction, because there are no installers to introduce you to.

Two things the form does not offer

A home battery. The model does not price batteries at all — not badly, not approximately, not at all — so there is no box for one. Offering the box and then producing a report with nothing in it about batteries would be a promise this site did not keep, which is the only kind of bug that matters here. If a battery is the thing you actually want to know about, say so in an email and you will get an honest no rather than a report that talks around it.

A charger, separately from the car. Ticking driving already includes a home charger in the upfront cost, so a second box would be the same money counted twice. If you would be charging away from home instead, mention it and the report prices it that way.