Economics

Verdify is not just trying to keep plants alive. It is trying to do that in a way that respects energy, water, timing, and the physical reality of a solar-aligned household greenhouse that still uses grid power and gas heat when needed. This is the canonical economics page for the site. The greenhouse costs about USD 4.28 per day on average to run. January can climb to roughly USD 270 per month when gas heating dominates; August can fall to about USD 20 per month. Those swings are part of the operating problem Verdify is built to solve.

This page answers:

1. What does the greenhouse actually cost to run?
2. Which utility streams matter most in each season?
3. How much of the electrical load aligns with solar production?
4. Which control decisions are cheap, and which are expensive?
5. Why does cost-aware control matter without turning the site into a utility report?

Why economics belong in the product story

The greenhouse sits on a home with rooftop solar and Tesla Powerwalls. That creates a real planning asymmetry:

• daytime electrical loads can align with solar production
• nighttime electrical loads can lean on storage
• natural gas remains the main winter heating cost That means the same control action can have very different economics depending on when it happens. Verdify is interesting partly because it is not optimizing in a vacuum. It is making real tradeoffs inside a physical system with measured resource use.

Live cost proof

The cost structure

The greenhouse has three utility streams:

• electricity for fans, fog, grow lights, controller hardware, and pumps

• natural gas for the Lennox furnace

• water for misting, irrigation, hydroponics, and humidity control That means Verdify is balancing at least three things at once:

• plant stress

• operating cost

• timing relative to solar production This is why economics belong under proof, not under a generic sustainability label. The point is not moral branding. The point is measured operating behavior.

By cost

The winter gas constraint

Solar helps with electric loads. It does not erase the winter gas problem. The 75,000 BTU Lennox furnace is the dominant winter operating cost. It is also far more cost-effective per BTU than the small electric heater. That is why Verdify stages electric heat first for mild dips and brings gas in for heavier work.

Cost-aware control

The planner does not optimize for cost first. Plant health comes first. But when two strategies produce similar plant outcomes, Verdify should prefer the cheaper one. That means questions like these are part of every planning cycle:

The cost-aware choices still happen through the bounded parameter list in AI-Writable Tunables.

• when is electric heat acceptable because it overlaps a solar-rich or battery-rich window?
• when is gas the better tool because the BTU economics are overwhelmingly better?
• when is fog worth its 1,644W draw because it avoids hours of VPD stress?
• when are grow lights lower-impact because the Powerwalls are full and solar is abundant? That is the real economics story. Not just what the greenhouse costs, but how intelligence changes the meaning of those costs.

Long-range proof

The long-range panels are useful for seasonal shape, not precise billing. They combine measured runtime/usage streams with static cost assumptions, so use them to inspect direction and resource mix rather than to reconcile a utility invoice.

Bottom line

The numbers are simple enough to say plainly:

• about USD 4.28/day average
• about USD 1,564/year
• about 62.6% solar alignment on electric load
• gas dominates winter cost
• water matters operationally more than financially That is why this page belongs in the proof layer. It shows that Verdify is not just technically interesting. It is operating inside real resource constraints, with measurable consequences. If you want the live operational state, go to Operations. Open Solar Dashboard ↗ · Open Cost Dashboard ↗