How Much Electricity Do LA Homes With Solar Actually Use? Measured Day by Day in 117 Homes

These are 117 homes in our Enphase monitoring fleet with a consumption meter and 12 complete months of clean data, 22 of them with a battery. A consumption meter measures everything the house uses, whether it comes from the panels, the battery or the grid, so these figures are the household’s real use, not what is left on the utility bill after solar. Each home is measured over its latest 12 complete months, for most of them October 2025 through September 2026; temperature figures use every clean day since 2021.

The spread is wide. 18 homes used under 15 kWh a day and 23 used 50 kWh or more; household size, a pool, an EV, an ADU on the same meter or an all-electric kitchen can each move a home from one band to another. Homes with a battery used more, a median 41 kWh a day against 31, and so did LADWP-area homes, 38 against 30 in SCE territory. That is largely geography: most of the LADWP homes sit in the hotter San Fernando Valley, most of the SCE homes elsewhere in the county.

From November through May the typical solar home used a steady 23.4–25.5 kWh a day. Then use climbed with the heat: 29.3 in June, 36.2 in July and 37.7 in August, before falling back through September and October. Measured home by home, the highest month used a median 2.3 times the lowest, and August used 1.9 times April.

The state average follows the same calendar at about half the level. Winter barely registers in either: many Los Angeles homes heat with gas, and in our data a day below 65 °F cost the typical home about the same as a mild one, while summer cooling adds a lot.

Below 75 °F the weather hardly matters: a cool day and a mild day cost the typical home about the same. Above it, air conditioning takes over. On 75–85 °F days the typical home used 15% more than on a mild day, on 85–95 °F days 62% more, and on days of 95 °F or more 2.1 times as much. A quarter of homes tripled their use on the hottest days.

Measured another way, on summer days above 75 °F the typical home added about 1.1 kWh a day for every extra degree of daily high (middle half 0.7–1.6 kWh). In the San Fernando Valley and Burbank the figure was 1.34 kWh per degree, against 0.99 elsewhere in Los Angeles County. What an air conditioner draws: how much electricity AC uses. The same heat also trims panel output a little: how heat affects solar output. The result shows up on the grid side as late-summer purchases: how much electricity solar homes still buy.

For the typical home, weekends barely differ: it used 1.4% more on Saturdays and Sundays than on weekdays, and the middle half of 150 homes fell between −2.9% and +6.5%. The weather moves a home’s use far more than the day of the week.

The state average of 16.5 kWh a day covers every residential account, including apartments, and the utility counts only what it delivers, which for a solar home is net of its own panels. These figures are whole-house use in mostly single-family homes, many of them in the warm valleys. Single-family homes use roughly twice as much as apartments in larger buildings, as the California Energy Commission’s appliance survey found; see average home electricity use in California.

There is also a selection effect: households that install solar tend to be the ones with high bills, and a system is sized to the home’s use. So these numbers describe homes that went solar, not every home in Los Angeles.