Reply to Solar Panels - Lease or Own

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Buying is better if you can afford the upfront investment[/quote]

I've read that if you buy them however, you are responsible for all the maintenance on them (at your dime of course).  Which to me seems like it would lead to a lot of non-functioning panels because of the expense associated with the repairs.  Is this true?[/quote]

The warranty will cover virtually any maintenance that would cost you any money. We've owned our panels for about four years, and there's been almost no maintenance needed — we did have to pay $185 to have our inverter connected to the Internet because the 3G wireless module it came with was being phased out, but we actually could have skipped that if we didn't want to keep getting SREC proceeds; we only needed it so the system would report back on production.

The SRECs make it well, well worth owning, at least in D.C. — our system brings in between $3,000 and $4,000 a year in SREC sales, and our total installation cost after the 30 percent federal tax credit was about $16,000. Not a whole lot of other investments that will throw off 20 percent a year, indefinitely (and that's not even accounting for the reduction in our electric bills).

We don't anticipate any additional maintenance costs going forward, but even if there were, it'd have to be pretty substantial to offset the benefits from selling the SRECs. If you lease, though, the owner of the system, i.e., the company you lease from, gets those proceeds.[/quote]

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