happy with solar

[Anonymous]

coming up on a year installed. we generated about 500 kWh less than we use, but there was a weeks outage for a wiring short during the height of summer solar generation so we might fully cover use next year. If I get ambitious I might track down all of the ambient power use and cut some of that back as well. Pepco gets their $20 a month regardless, but it's so much better than $300/mo. Between SRECs and power bill savings, the panels should pay us back in 3 years, and the full system (we got 30kWh of batteries) in 5.5 years.

I'm a fan.

[Anonymous]

(we're in DC, SRECs elsewhere are no where near as valuable)

[Anonymous]

We installed last year and got $15k back on our taxes (just did them a few weeks ago). Big electrical bill savings too. We don't have batteries, and SRECs aren't worth much in MD, but still worthwhile overall. I think our payback period will be around 7 years.

[Anonymous]

If we had enough sunlight we’d probably be all in, but the roof of our house slopes on the north/south facing sides and on the southern side we have a hill with large trees/woods that block the sun. We had two solar companies take a look.

[Anonymous]

How do you make them not look ugly? I want the savings but few houses can hide them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you make them not look ugly? I want the savings but few houses can hide them.

i've got a flat roof, so only marine one fleet and the medevac helicopters really see them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do you make them not look ugly? I want the savings but few houses can hide them.

i've got a flat roof, so only marine one fleet and the medevac helicopters really see them.

That is awesome. I hate the look of them on the front of homes but they are tolerable on the backsides.

Also, I am skeptical of those that said they pay themselves off in three years. How much electricity do you use? We have gas and electric and our electric bills are nothing in the winter but higher in the summer.

How much were the panels and install?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do you make them not look ugly? I want the savings but few houses can hide them.

i've got a flat roof, so only marine one fleet and the medevac helicopters really see them.

That is awesome. I hate the look of them on the front of homes but they are tolerable on the backsides.

Also, I am skeptical of those that said they pay themselves off in three years. How much electricity do you use? We have gas and electric and our electric bills are nothing in the winter but higher in the summer.

How much were the panels and install?

Over the course of the last year we basically generated 100% of the power we used, around 21.5MWh. The system (powers and inverters and controllers) installed was around $2.75/W. So a "19,000"W system (the panels are rated 450W, but the microinverters max out at 290W) generated 21.5MWh of power, which pays us around $8500 a year in SREC income and saves around $3000/year in power payments. 30% of the system cost was refunded in our taxes, leaving around $37000, so we will be paid back in a little over 3 years assuming power costs stay flat, sooner if they rise. We do use gas for heat, and have LEDs everywhere, but it's still a power-hungry house with around 5000sf including basement.

All of this math goes out the window if you need to finance it or if you don't live in DC where SRECs are valuable. And obviously I have no idea what current hardware and install costs are, but from browsing r/solar it looks like solar systems should still be at or under $3 a Watt cash or it's a bad deal.

[Anonymous]

Also, the cost per panel doesn't vary much. It seems to be the same if you have one panel or 20. So the payoff doesn't change so long as you don't oversize.

If you oversize and produce more electricity than you use you don't get paid for it.

[Anonymous]

I am also very happy with the system (no battery) installed in 2022 in DC. We have a flat roof with parapets so really one one wire is visible from the street, which does frustrate me.

Our house is 1670 sq feet. Our 2023 generation was 9.3 MWh using 22 panels. I'm not sure what our power usage is but the only month we pay more than the $20 fixed cost to PEPCO is the month after PEPCO's pays out our accrued balance. This year, that was in the area of $500.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If we had enough sunlight we’d probably be all in, but the roof of our house slopes on the north/south facing sides and on the southern side we have a hill with large trees/woods that block the sun. We had two solar companies take a look.

This is my house, too. I figure the solar companies want to sell me a system, so if they say it won’t work for me, then it won’t.

[Anonymous]

The solar industry is cratering because home solar doesn’t make economic sense without SRECS, and even states like CA are cutting back heavily on SRECS because they subsidize the power bills of the rich people and get passed along to the poor in the form of higher electricity rates. Meanwhile, even though the CA system is saturated with excess solar power in the middle of the day, they haven’t appreciably lowered carbon emissions due to the need for fossil plants to run all day as spinning reserves to be prepared to meet load every evening when solar disappears, plus the inefficiencies inherent in ramping fossil plants up and down. Not to mention a lot of that solar is just replacing non-carbon emitting nuclear power plants that CA chose to shut down. And no, there’s no way they can build enough battery capacity to make a difference.

This has some charts, including the CA “duck curve” charts that show the problem.

https://x.com/fictitious_cap/status/1744935148049821818?s=61&t=txL8mt-h7Q8BLpSNAiAzrQ

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The solar industry is cratering because home solar doesn’t make economic sense without SRECS, and even states like CA are cutting back heavily on SRECS because they subsidize the power bills of the rich people and get passed along to the poor in the form of higher electricity rates. Meanwhile, even though the CA system is saturated with excess solar power in the middle of the day, they haven’t appreciably lowered carbon emissions due to the need for fossil plants to run all day as spinning reserves to be prepared to meet load every evening when solar disappears, plus the inefficiencies inherent in ramping fossil plants up and down. Not to mention a lot of that solar is just replacing non-carbon emitting nuclear power plants that CA chose to shut down. And no, there’s no way they can build enough battery capacity to make a difference.

This has some charts, including the CA “duck curve” charts that show the problem.

https://x.com/fictitious_cap/status/1744935148049821818?s=61&t=txL8mt-h7Q8BLpSNAiAzrQ

Funny, I've installed solar on two houses in the past two years, one in DC and one in RI. Both times when I talked to the installer he said they were selling them as fast as they could write contracts and the wait to install was a few months.