Solar

DT said:
There's an existing thread for this with all sorts of terrific info, including costs/ROI analysis:

Solar

Looking into getting solar panels to reduce our electricity consumption on the grid. Have several quotes with a couple more coming in, but the consensus is around 50 panels (one was more panels, like 54). No battery backup as that would essentially double the cost. Wife worries that if we...
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I searched but did not find and subsequently asked that this be merged with it.
 
Getting a quote today From Sunrun. Of interest the salesman said if we don’t want to absorb the upfront costs, we can lease, yes I said lease which at first chance has some desirable aspects. Will report back.
 
I’ve got a quote from a large solar provide called Sunrun. I‘ll be looking it over. It seems that this involves the expense of $40-50k, that the loan would be 10 years of paying 30-40% more than my average electric bill and then how many more years to break even? This is a long term investment I’m almost 70, and I don’t know how long we’ll be in this house. If the house is sold, paying off this loan would result in a loss, if it were to happen before the break even point.

Now as far as the grid and future price increases or reliability, I suppose the dynamics could change along with the break even point.

Of interest, this company offers a leasing program. They pay for the install, you sign a 25 year lease (need to confirm) and you pay less than the going rate for electricity say $.10 a KW instead of $.13 the going rate, with limits on on how much the rate could go up yearly. I need to get a better feel for how much savings there is with this option, but the length of the lease and what actually dictates price increases is a concern. According to them, if you sell your house, this breaks the lease, and they will either negotiate with the new owners or uninstall the equipment. This is also a concern to me as far as possibly making the house less appealing for selling.

The last but not least option is to renew a contract with a local electric provider. Texas is good in this regard. The system here is that electric providers feed into the grid, and you can choose to pay whoever is offering the better deal via short to longer term contract.

More to come.
 
Sunrun offers a lease option, but there you are only getting a discounted electricity price, along the lines of $.03kw per hour, and it is subject to going up, and it’s a 25 year lease. I’ve got such a proposal and I’m going to run it by my lawyer because although I have gotten verbal reassurances that selling your house with such a setup/agreement is no issue, but I need a legal read of the agreement.
 
Once again, I’m considering solar panels. Does anyone here have panels, but regrets it? Are you still receiving bills from your local electrical provider? If financing, how long is your loan for, does your loan match your old electrical bills or are you saving money while financing ? Thanks! 🙂

Of note I recently had a Generac standby generator installed though Lowe’s. That was $14k.
 
My friend has 24 panels on his garage roof. He is an electrician, so he was able to install the inverter himself, saving himself thousands of dollars. He showed me the gauge reading, which was on a heavily clouded day: the output was around 9 kilowatts. He puts more into the grid on average than he takes out, so his electric bill is the connection fee of $7/mo. And, of course, when the power goes out, his refrigerator still runs (during the day, as he does not have battery backup) which is probably enough.
 
Different cost structure here in New Zealand but we substantially upgraded our system with 19.2kwh battery capacity and a 10kw inverter last December and don’t regret it.

For five months of the year our monthly grid draw is 10kwh or less. We run our ducted heat pump (that’s A/C for cooling and heating to you i guess?), three refrigerators, electric oven, washing machine etc and still send a large amount of power back to the grid during the peak 8 hours or so on sunny days (yes, we have enough solar panelling to generate almost 10kw peak, around 6-7 on cloudy days provided the cloud cover isn’t dense).

The kicker is that return on power sent to grid is about 30% (actually better than most retailers offer; some offer 0!), monthly connection charge about nz$70, and retailers sneak in other charges for ‘metering’ etc. It would be tempting to go off grid except the math doesn’t work in winter (if we operate the heat pump) and we’d need to supplement with other solutions like wind energy.

Consider as well that New Zealand’s climate is mostly mild.
 
ArgoDuck said:
our ducted heat pump (that’s A/C for cooling and heating to you i guess?)
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Heat pumps are gradually increasing in popularity in the US. I believe most freshly-built homes will have one, and our power company offers a deal on smaller scale models. Many newer American homes also have air-to-air heat exchangers so that they can turn over the inside air without a huge hit in climate control, as modern code seems to require they be built out of tupperware.
 

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