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Estimating Energy Usage from Customer’s Bill Amount

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Do you have a potential solar customer’s 12 months of bills or their annual bill amount for electricity? If so, we can now estimate energy usage from that information!

It is quite common for potential solar customers to not know how much energy they are using but to have an idea of how much they are paying for electricity. For situations like this, Genability’s Bill Solve feature in our Calculate API is a useful tool for our Switch customers. After creating a site for your potential customer in our API, you can enter the cost of the customer’s bill and our calculator will estimate their electricity usage. You can then use this kWh value to run solar savings calculations.

Our Switch customers found a lot of value in estimating electricity usage for a single monthly bill through our Bill Solve feature so we made it more useful by upgrading this feature to work for annual bill amounts too! Now for situations where potential solar customers know how much they spend annually on electricity, you can use our Bill Solve feature to estimate the customer’s annual kWh.

Although we support estimating annual kWh based on annual bill amounts, the more specific information you provide to the Bill Solve, the more precise the customer’s electricity usage will be. Here is a list of Bill Solve methods ranked in order from the most precise method to the least precise method:

  1. Turn the monthly bill cost into monthly kWh using the exact billing period dates (e.g., 7/13/2017 to 8/12/2017)

  2. Turn the monthly bill cost into monthly kWh using approximate billing period dates (e.g., 7/1/2017 to 8/1/2017)

  3. Turn the annual bill cost into annual kWh using exact annual dates (e.g., 7/13/2016 to 7/13/2017)

  4. Turn the annual bill cost into annual kWh using approximate annual dates (e.g., 7/1/2016 to 7/1/2017)

Based on this information, we recommend using the bill amount of a monthly bill with exact billing period dates to solve for a customer’s usage since this will provide you the most precise kWh. However, you are welcome to use our Bill Solve feature to estimate a customer’s usage based on an annual bill amount if it is common for your potential solar customers to know this information.

If you are an existing Switch customer of ours who would like to add our Bill Solve feature in your proposal tool, please take a look at our developer How-To on Turning Bills into kWh. If you are not our customer but you are interested in utilizing our Bill Solve feature for your solar proposals, please reach out to the sales team to find out more about our Switch product today!

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