2025 by the numbers

Odometers

The original category I’ve been tracking for a few years now because I like to compare my biking vs driving miles. It’s gotten more interesting to track since we got an electric car and a solar setup.

Cars

First up, the cars:

Figuring out where this electricity came from is a bit of an exercise, since I charge at home and at work. When charging at home, my SPAN smart panel is typically set up so that it will only charge the car after the house battery is full, and I typically do not pull from the grid.

This strategy works most of the year, but in the winter time, there are stretches where I do need to import from the grid specifically to charge the car, so I reconfigure SPAN to pull from the grid.

The net is that almost all of my car charging actually comes from my own solar panels, thus making our Bolt extremely clean to operate.

Anyway…

In total, the adventure van cost $0.90 per mile to operate and the EV cost $0.41 per mile to operate, so 50% cheaper to drive.

Bikes

Next are the bikes.

This doesn’t include any recreational bike miles.

The total then, is 2952 bike commuter miles.

Summary

Total commuter mileage: 13222

Broken down by distance, that’s 22% by bike and 78% by car. I don’t have a frequency breakdown though, and while that’d be interesting to look at, I don’t have a painless way to collect the data.

Exercise

My cumulative training hours took a dip in 2025, but my overall training load was about the same.

intervals.icu

statshunters

strava

This is because I started lifting weights again, which I haven’t seriously done in probably over a decade. I went with the stronglifts program, with the goal of getting stronger and building lean muscle mass while I still can.

As is common, the early days of the program were fun and motivating as it was easy to make gains every session. I progressed quite steadily for multiple weeks, and then in November, as is common, I injured myself deadlifting and had a hard time even bending over for over a week. This was super disappointing, since I’ve always been able to deadlift quite heavy.

I eventually recovered on my own simply by resting, but I learned an important lesson, which is to have clear goals in mind. And for me, the goal is not to set PRs every session, but rather to maintain a solid baseline of strength, which does not require maxing out constantly.

You can see from the graphs that I’m slowly building back up, and also repeating weights for multiple sessions before adding more. Slow and steady is the name of the game here.

Books

This was not a good year for reading, as I only managed to finish two books at all:

What I can say is that the Unaccountability Machine is really powerful in terms of helping me better understand the world through its lens of cybernetics. Highly recommended to anyone interested in systems-level thinking.

Solar

This was the first year that we had solar!

I learned quite a lot. But first the stats.

Generated 8.8 MWh off a 7.4kW array.

Our actual usage was 6.4 MWh, which doesn’t align exactly with the numbers above, because our battery is not big enough to cover 100% of our needs 100% of the time, so we ended up importing from the grid during the winter months.

The app estimates we saved about $2200 in energy costs, which feels approximately correct. The payback period for this installation is unfortunately still extremly long, but hey, we avoided creating 3.4 tons of CO2. In California, that seems to be worth about $25 per ton at cap-and-trade auctions, so I’m going to claim an additional $85 of value.

So what did I learn in my first year of solar?

I was (predictably) obsessed with the stats generated by the system for the first 6 months, constantly checking in on the various apps to see what was going on. But after a while, I mostly stopped worrying about it.

I ran the battery down to 5% reserve for most of the year to maximize cost savings, but at times, when major storm warnings occurred, I bumped the reserve up to 70% to hedge against a grid outage. We got pretty lucky here, never actually losing grid power, but it was nice peace of mind.

Our usage is fairly consistent the entire year. We don’t have an A/C, and we have a gas furnace, whose electric blower consumes about 1 kW when running. Our system isn’t sized to cover the winter months – our 7.4 kW array isn’t big enough to fully charge our 13 kWh battery, and a 13 kWh battery wouldn’t cover our daily usage.

If we really wanted to be fully self-sufficient during the winter months, we’d need to double our storage capacity and probably triple our generation capacity, both of which would be extremely cost-prohibitive in 2025 prices. Plus, I’m still waiting for the EV industry to standardize their V2H implementations because it seems criminal to pay $20K for a 13 kWh battery when it’s possible to buy an F-150 Lightning with a 100+ kWh battery for $60K and you can haul mulch with it.

What is shocking is how utterly wasteful driving is. My car commute is ~20 miles round trip, which requires 5.1 kWh of electricity, while the entire house consumes between 10 – 15 kWh per day.

It’s depressing to see how energy intensive it is to move that much mass around.