The $1,200 Winter: How a Fortuna Home Went All-Electric and Brought Its Bill Down to $179

A deer, an overpass and a Christmas wish

Some energy decisions begin with a spreadsheet. Khrystine Bugbee's began on Highway 101 on the way home from a Christmas party in 2024, when a deer jumped over the cement wall in front of her car.

She grew up in Humboldt County, and she had learned the local rule early: if you are going to hit a deer, don't slam on the brakes. She didn't. The car kept rolling, across into the number three lane just before it merged, and up onto the Loleta overpass before it died completely.

She took it with a sense of humor. "Maybe that was one of Santa's reindeer," she says, "and he wants me to get a really cool toy for Christmas." The toy turned out to be a Tesla she had admired for a long time, with full self-driving and a zero-to-sixty time of 2.9 seconds. "That is a whole lot of fun," she says, "and it never gets old."

What she had not fully reckoned with was where the car would lead. Once you fuel your driving with electricity, the price of that electricity stops being a line item you skim past. In Khrystine's house, it was already a problem.

The bill that was bigger than a mortgage

Her home in Fortuna is 2,200 square feet, and it was heated the conventional way: a central furnace burning natural gas and pushing warm air through every room at once. Before she changed rate plans, she was paying PG&E roughly 50 cents for nearly every kilowatt-hour the house used.

Her first winter there, the highest bill came in at more than $1,200.

"That's more than a lot of people pay for a mortgage or rent," she says. A number like that does something most utility bills don't. It drags a long-term question into the present. "At some point I'm going to retire," she remembers thinking, "and I need to fix that cost."

The new car offered a partial fix. Enrolling in PG&E's EV time-of-use rate dropped her price to 31 cents per kilowatt-hour from midnight to 3 p.m. Like every time-of-use plan, it came with the other half of the bargain. From 3 to 4 p.m. the price rose to 48 cents. From 4 to 9 p.m., the hours when a household cooks dinner, runs the dishwasher and turns up the heat, it peaked at 65 cents. Then it fell back to 48 cents until midnight.

Charging the car overnight got cheaper. Everything else in the house was still exposed to the expensive hours.

A neighbor at the kitchen table

Khrystine had considered solar before. This time she sat down with a Six Rivers Solar consultant in June, and the conversation turned out to be closer to home than she expected. The consultant lived nearby and could pull up the production numbers from a Six Rivers system a short distance from her own roof.

That detail carries more weight on the North Coast than it would almost anywhere else. People in Humboldt County hear plenty of doubt about what solar can do under coastal fog, and the most convincing answer is output from a house in the same neighborhood, under the same sky. "I just got a really good vibe," she says. "So I was like, all right. I'm going to try one more time."

Designing for the house she was going to have

The first half of the design conversation was the familiar one: how many panels does this home need to cover what it uses today. The second half was more interesting, because Khrystine had no intention of using energy the way she had been.

The furnace was the largest load in the house, and she wanted it gone. The hot tub on the deck sat unplugged because she could no longer afford to run it. And the first Tesla was unlikely to be the last.

So the system was deliberately overbuilt. Six Rivers designed a 14.35 kW array of 35 Mission Solar 410-watt panels, sized for the all-electric household she was heading toward. It was paired with a PointGuard hybrid inverter and 24 kWh of battery storage, which is what lets the system work alongside PG&E's time-of-use rate. Solar energy produced at midday can be stored and drawn down between 4 and 9 p.m., when grid power costs the most.

The project moved quickly. First conversation in June. Crews on the roof by August. The system was connected on September 4th.

The timing carried a bonus. Khrystine signed on in time to claim the 30 percent federal residential clean energy credit before it expired at the end of 2025. By her accounting, the credit covered the cost of her second Tesla. "I basically got it for free as part of the bundle," she says.

Going all in

With the solar in place, Khrystine removed her gas furnace and central HVAC entirely and replaced them with five zones of ductless mini-split heat pumps, including one in each upstairs bedroom.

The change goes beyond the fuel. A central furnace treats the house as a single room. Click the thermostat up and every space tries to reach temperature at once, whether anyone is in it or not. Zoned heat pumps let her heat the room she is actually using, which turns heating from a whole-house decision into a series of small, cheap ones.

$179

Then came winter, the season that had produced the $1,200 bill.

Khrystine's highest PG&E bill was $179. That figure arrived before PG&E had granted her system permission to operate, while she was still paying the 31, 48 and 65 cent time-of-use rates.

That is roughly an 85 percent drop from her previous winter high, in a house that now heats entirely with electricity, charges an electric car in the garage, and was sized from the start to bring the hot tub back.

What this home shows

Most homeowners think of solar panels, batteries, electric cars and heat pumps as four separate projects, each with its own payback calculation. Khrystine's house makes the case for treating them as one. Sizing the array for the household she was building toward meant every later change landed on a system that already had room to carry it.

If your winter bills look the way Khrystine's used to, Six Rivers Solar can show you production numbers from homes near yours and design a system around where your household is headed.