AND, you are very careful with your consumption and watch it closely. Something almost everyone else does not and will not do.
Every person I personally know that have solar setups all are very conscious of what they use. It works in those situations.
Yes and no.
Yes in that I replaced my old AC and gas furnace with a variable speed heat pump, with heat strips for the times it gets too cold here (Alabama) for the heat pump. Yes in that I replaced my gas water heater with a hybrid one (built in heat pump that runs on only 380W). Yes in that I added insulation and closed gaps and such. And yes in that I had 2 charging circuits installed for the EV so that I could charge the EV to about 50% for local driving on rainy days with a constantly powered circuit (that circuit is always on, but not always free power), and if the EV is charged more than 50% switch it to the intermittent charging circuit (not always on, but always free power) to charge it all the way to 80% if the power is free. So yes, by those steps I have been careful with my consumption.
But no, I haven't been careful in my consumption if by that you assume that I have reduced my quality of life. We still keep the A/C set to whatever comfortable temp we want, still drive as much as we want (1,500 miles per month on home charged miles alone), and still get in the hot tub as much as we want, etc.
It's simply that doing all those things we used to do as much as we used to do and whenever we want to do doesn't consume as much energy as they used to. Combined with decentralized solar providing 80% of the power we consume, thus only 20% having to come from the grid, then our lifestyle doesn't pull nearly as much power from the grid as we used to (4,370 kWh pulled from the grid in all of year 2025, for an all-electric house and charging the EV for 18K miles). Even after converting virtually all of our energy consumption to electric (no more natural gas appliances, and doing almost all of our driving in our EV instead of our gas pickup) our power bills average only $77/month.
If I wasn't selling a little power to the grid, which nets me about $100/year after the extra fees I have to pay for the privilege of selling power to the grid, my power bills would be about $85/month average.
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Slight topic change: The notion of what's my business is my business, not the over regulated power utility's business.
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If I wasn't selling power to the grid, which I didn't do for the first 2 years of owning solar, the power utility wouldn't know that I had solar. For the first 2 years I had solar, I disabled my solar inverter(s) output feature -- I didn't put power onto the grid -- and I didn't tell them I had solar. What happened on my side of the meter was my business. As far as the utility was concerned, I was a normal power consumer like everyone else except that I consumed a lot less than most folks (as they saw it, since they see only what passes through the meter).
Three years ago I studied years worth of the telemetry of my inverters (imported it into a SQL database and queried the stew out of it) and decided it'd save me $8/month on avg to sell power to the grid (even after the extra fees I'd have to pay to be able to sell power). So I contacted the power utility, told them I had solar and signed up for a grid sell contract. Now that I put power onto the grid on the days I have excess power even after charging my battery stack, there's still the fact that what happens on my side of the meter is my business, not the grid's business. In other words, the utility has no clue how much power I consume (last year in 2025 I consumed 21,552 kWh). They only know when I pull power from the grid (4,370 kWh last year) and, now that I sell power to the grid, they know when I sell power (4,454 kWh last year).
Basically, if the left took over Alabama (or nationally to the Nth degree) and wanted to micro-manage how much life we get to enjoy through energy consumption, as far as they know I'm enjoying life only 20% as much as I really am (the 20% of my power I pull from the grid), because they don't see the rest of the power I consume that never has to go through the meter. Put another way, being 80% energy reliant not only saves me money, it hides 80% of my energy consumption lifestyle from the energy regulators.