Cheapest solar panel installer in DC

[Anonymous]

Posting this on this forum as well, in addition to home improvement. I live in Mount Pleasant: anyone had a chance to price the solar companies and who offers the lowest cash offer for the solar roof?

[Anonymous]

Jeff had a write up about getting solar a few days ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jeff had a write up about getting solar a few days ago.

Can you provide a link ?

[Anonymous]

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/weblog/2024/04/20/special042024

[jsteele]

In addition to the cost of installation, you should take into consideration a number of other factors such as:

1) the quality of the panels - there are various websites that evaluate different brands of panels in terms of efficiency and other factors;
2) the longevity of the panels - all panels will lose efficiency over time but some lose faster than others;
3) the warranty;
4) the overall proposal offered - we had proposals for significantly different numbers of panels and placed in drastically different locations and it seemed like some companies simply wanted to put panels on the roof without concern for optimizing for best performance.

[Anonymous]

basically the large considerations for solar are:

1) can you pay cash, or do you need to finance?

2) has the installer been in the area for a good amount of time, do they have a good reputation?

3) microinverters vs string-- a hardware failure could potentially take out an entire string of panels vs losing a single panel. the reliability of the installer/support and parts supply chain and your sensitivity to downtime will influence your decision here. optimizers mean that there isn't really _much_ difference between the output of the two now if you have some differences in shading across the panels.

4) do you need/want batteries? batteries are less expensive now but they are NOT cost-effective. financing batteries is absurd.

5)solar bids are generally priced based in $/W, but that's based on the nameplate of the solar panels. We have microinverters, so the microinverter actually limits how much power is generated by the panels. Our panels are rated at 450W, but the microinverters max out at 290VA. In full summer sun, this results in "clipping", where the output curve is flat for several hours. The rationale is that you don't want to spend more in microinverter cost than you would actually generate in power, and it's much better to have additional area at the bottom of the curve than at the top. A lot of the hardware choice in any specific quote really depends on what the installer has in stock/has good pricing on.

a quote over $3 per watt cash for a solar system with no batteries and no SREC sale would seem to be a bad deal currently.

Sometimes the installer will give you an upfront discount on the system if you sell them the SRECs for the life of the system. This is generally a bad deal in DC if you have the cash for installing the system, but if you need to finance the system and don't want to deal with SREC sales, it might be an ok way to go.

Also, in general you should be looking to your bank/credit union for a loan, and not to the solar installer. Most of the terrible solar terms revolve around shady financing scams.

[Anonymous]

one note: enphase's newer microinverters (iq8+) can create an internal microgrid when there is a power outage.

before the iq8s, if there was a long-running power outage your solar panels were also dead in the water, because you cannot backfeed power into the grid when the grid is down.

now if you install the controller (part of the system if you also get batteries), you can potentially make use of the solar panels in a long-running grid outage.

as for best lowest price, we got our lowest price as part of a coop buy: https://solarswitch.com/en/washingtondc/home

you can also check out the list of vendors that won previous coop bids for a decent selection of potential vendors: https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org/completed-coops-with-installers/

We used Solar Solutions.