Inside Our Readers’ Electrified Lives

For the past year, this series has documented stories of Americans going electric, their carbon footprints shrinking with each new plug-in vehicle or appliance. Now, as we bring the series to a close, we turned to you, our climate-conscious readers, for your own stories about going electric. Dozens of you responded, sending us anecdotes and photos extolling your electric cars and lawn mowers, lauding your e-bikes, praising your heat pumps and raving about your induction stoves.

Here are your submissions by the numbers:

78 of you wrote in to tell us your stories of going electric

37 of those stories included an electric vehicle

34 included a heat pump

22 included an e-bike

20 included an induction stove

Watching these stories roll in was like a steady dopamine drip of evidence-based anecdotes showing our world becoming cleaner, greener and more efficient. So we wanted to share them with everyone. Scroll down to see the many ways that going electric has improved your lives –– and made the planet a better place to live.

When we were about to have our second kid I was looking at new cars that would have room for our bigger family. Every gas-powered SUV still had poor gas mileage and huge tanks. Not knowing if I would be able to afford it when it arrived, I put a deposit on a Rivian R1S in 2018, the night my son was born. I was not only thinking about the immediate future, but what kind of world I wanted to leave him. After all, it was his now. – Kendall Ruth

What better impetus for going electric: a dangerous gas leak, right into our front bedroom! We immediately shut off the gas for good (yippee, no more gas bills!) and changed our instantaneous water heater to a heat pump, our gas cooktop to induction, and our two gas space heaters to reverse-cycle air conditioners. Then we installed 10kW rooftop solar panels and two batteries. The result? Free power even when the grid is down, a fantastically convenient cooktop, summer cooling as well as winter heating, and hot water that costs practically nothing. – Marion Gray

Our conversion was driven by both the economy and the environment. We put solar panels on our roof and then bought two electric cars. Now we have no gasoline bill and our utility bill is usually around $25. Not bad for California! – Bob Adams

I bought an electric city bike on a cycle-to-work scheme. I’m recovering from cancer treatment and having the electric bike has helped my mental health. Today I cycled in 30-mile-an-hour winds to work. Why? Because I can! Exhilarating! – X Jacqui 

Our house is 100 percent electric, including heated floors via a heat pump. We charge our electric car and e-bikes on the same grid. We produce enough electricity to cover our needs year round with some extra to feed back into the grid for others. An added bonus, the system more than paid for itself within seven years. – Eileen and Jack

We purchased the Chevy all-electric Bolt in 2018 and what a joy to never go to a gas station again! It has great pick up, is easy to park and has the added benefit of not being a Tesla. – Anneke Campbell

We got a heat pump three years ago as Covid was waning.  It was expensive. However, we live in British Columbia where fires have been an issue for the last 20 years. The best use of our heat pump is to clean and cool the air when we are trapped inside during dangerous smoke levels. It’s quiet, efficient, and since we installed it up high on our dining room wall, acceptable aesthetically. – Helen Davis

Having used an electric burner stove for years before I got a gas stove I never thought I’d go back to electric. Then I moved and there wasn’t a gas stove so I purchased a single-burner induction cooktop to see if I would like it. Overall I find the induction vastly superior to everything else I’ve used, including gas. It’s faster to heat than gas, the temperature changes immediately when you turn it down or up just like gas, and overall it turned out to be cheaper to operate than my old halogen glass top. – Dave

I live in Zurich and got a new e-bike two months ago. It’s for sure the fastest means of transport to move around the city, you can park it everywhere and you don’t need to sweat the climbs uphill. It costs way less than a car and requires lower maintenance. The main drawback is bad weather, but other than that it’s flawless. I estimated how much time I am saving now with my e-bike and it amounts to almost an hour per week or around two days per year! – Mariano Jaimez

We had a flooring mishap where a guy doing work slipped and his foot went through the glass door of our dual-fuel stove and the company no longer made the part. My time had come: we made the leap to an induction stovetop. Big adjustment, but aside from replacing a few aluminum pans with ferrous metal, it has been great. Though occasionally miss the open flame, definitely do not miss the gas! Electric in Philly! – Jane Kauer

We built our house in 2011 to be as close to net-zero as possible including a ground-source heat pump, solar water heater and solar panels. We replaced our propane stove with an induction range and bought an electric car in 2018 to end our connection to fossil fuels. We are not quite net zero anymore but we are committed to making as small an impact on the planet as possible. – Sandy

I needed a new lawn mower, and decided to go electric rather than gas powered. I was initially concerned about battery life and general power output, but I can easily handle all of my lawn on one charge, and it’s just as strong as my previous mower. But the BEST benefit is the noise and smell –– it’s extremely quiet as compared to the traditional gas mower, and there is no exhaust smell. – Austin Moyers 

The journey towards electric started about ten years ago. My first step was to install solar to cover about half of my electric bill. It took just seven years to pay for itself after the incentives were deducted. Two summers ago I doubled the solar capacity and haven’t paid an electric bill since. This summer I installed a heat pump –– I interviewed everyone I knew who tried it and not a single person was unhappy with the result. So far it’s kept the house tolerable on the worst days of summer and I’m looking forward to the benefits of additional heat in the winter. Another purchase made this summer was an e-bike which I loved so much that I bought another for my wife for her birthday. – Dan

After occasional, recreational biking most of my life, I bought a pedal-assist ebike and now it’s my primary form of transportation because it has so dramatically changed for the better the experience and utility of daily local shopping and meetings. As a city commissioner, I attend a lot of meetings and set an example for my city’s residents to use the extensive bike paths and trails we have here in Altamonte Springs, Florida. – Jim Turney

I swapped out our five-burner gas range for a two-unit induction cooktop. I also stopped using our gas clothes dryer. We bought a rack and air-dry everything. We changed our gas fireplace to electric. Minor adjustments were required for all these changes, but our gas bill plummeted and it feels good to do something for the environment. Also, the induction cooktop is easy to clean and gives a modern, sleek appearance. – Jane Udall

Moved from the UK to France nine years ago. We worked through ignorance in a step-by-step process of electrifying everything. A lump sum from my pension enabled us to buy a Renault Zoe electric car. Then we started transforming the house: interior insulation, then installation of a high-temperature heat pump to power the existing hot-water central heating system, and then, finally, the solar panels. At that point, the cuts to our energy bills were deep and lasting. Our neighbors were ever so interested in what we were doing and some of them invested in parallel developments; social normalizing at work! – Gill Sykes and Paul Davis

We are on our second electric car (five years total) and we just installed a heat pump. I am planning on installing batteries next, but waiting on solar cells as we live close to the Arctic Circle and our property is not ideal for today’s solar collectors. I read about new technologies every day. We belong to Besteforeldre Mot Klimaendringer (Grandparents Against Climate Change), are organic gardeners, and have planted many trees as future carbon sinks. – John L. Acomb

I’m in Victoria, Australia, and a couple of years ago decided to have the gas cut off from my property and go all electric. I don’t have much money so I went for a cheap hot-water heat pump and got about $2,000 in rebates. Then I bought a portable plug-in two-hotplate induction cooker as getting the electrical wiring done for a proper stove top would’ve been too expensive. I still have my gas stove and just put a board cut to size on top and sit the induction cooker on that. I live alone so I don’t need too much. This all means I no longer have high gas bills and no gas-supply charge. – Chris Hooper

I live in Luxembourg and replaced our gas heating with a heat pump and solar power on our roof. Costs for heating and warm water were consequently cut from around 3,500 euros per year to around 500 euros per year (with some more minor potential by fine tuning). Break-even point will be in around eight or nine years. I have absolutely no regrets! – Jonah

In 2022, I got a split heat pump after the devastating heat in our area in 2021. It got to 41 Celcius (106 Fahrenheit) which is very hot for our area, and I felt ill for a couple of days and even had to sleep in the garage to get away from the heat. After getting the split heat pump I feel I have some control over how hot it gets in my townhouse. British Columbia saw over 800 people die due to heat-related days in 2021 and I don’t want to be a statistic like that. – S. Fahey

Last year, we replaced the floor furnace in our apartment with a heat pump. The comfort improvements were immediate –– finally, warm bedrooms in winter! But a real surprise came during installation, when we discovered the old furnace’s rusted flue had been filling the crawlspace with exhaust gas. – Anonymous

When I moved into my 1956 house I donated the kitchen range because I knew I wouldn’t want to turn that huge American oven on to cook for just me. Best decision! Now I have two high-power induction burners, and a countertop convection oven, all of which can easily move outdoors if I want to cook something messy or smelly, or to avoid heating up the house in the summer. Plus, it’s plenty of space and power to cook family dinners for five or more when my kids and grandkids come over, and the burners are put away when I’m not using them so I have clear, calm counters for the majority of the time. – Nikki Jackson

I bought an electric car a couple of years ago because I wanted to decrease my carbon footprint, but I didn’t expect all the other advantages to having an electric vehicle. It only has a 100-mile range, yet I have never been even close to running out of battery. I usually just plug it into the wall outlet when I come home and it charges overnight. I don’t ever worry about the price of gas and I’m SO glad that I don’t have to stop at dirty gas stations anymore. Oil changes are a thing of the past, and the car runs much smoother than most combustion cars. I just love it. – Denisse