What your solar bill actually costs you: the self-consumption gap

Exporting cheap, buying back dear

Most solar owners export power during the day at a low feed-in rate, then buy power back in the evening at the much higher usage rate. The gap between those two numbers is the real cost.

Shifting some of that daytime export to daytime use — hot water, pool pump, EV charging, or a battery — avoids buying it back later. That avoided cost is usually far bigger than the feed-in itself.

This is the number that often dwarfs the feed-in gap

It's why batteries and load-shifting come up so often: they let you use your own cheap solar instead of selling it cheap and buying it back dear.

How much it's worth depends on how much of your export you could realistically shift — a documented assumption, not a magic number.

See your own figure

A free audit reads your bill, models your solar, and puts a dollar figure on your self-consumption gap — with every assumption on screen.