• There has been a recent cluster of spammers accessing BARFer accounts and posting spam. To safeguard your account, please consider changing your password. It would be even better to take the additional step of enabling 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) on your BARF account. Read more here.

Solar Advice

HappyHighwayman said:
Tesla's process is a real "don't give a fuck" process. Once they send you a design there is only a "let's do it!" button and no "Hey this has a mistake please fix it button"

They sent me a design with solar panels on all the roofs attached to my house which I don't own.
Click to expand...
I contemplated the tile roof when shopping since our roof needed replacement. They were salesperson-only at that point and are suuuuuuper behind their roadmap as far as progress. That combined with Tesla's already nefarious proprietary stranglehold on their cars made it a 100% no to use them on a crucial piece of home structure, of which they have no direct experience with.
 
Not sure if this was mentioned, but the return on investment tends to be great in places like the Central Valley, where $500 electrical bills are common, and solar often knocks them down to close to zero or under.

In places like Pacifica, The Sunset District in SF, and most coastal towns, the return on investment is simply not near that of the Central Valley, and may not make it even remotely attractive.

I don't run AC, outside of 3-5 days a year, and my electrical bill is quite low. If I got solar, it would amortize long after my departure from this world.
 
afm199 said:
Not sure if this was mentioned, but the return on investment tends to be great in places like the Central Valley, where $500 electrical bills are common, and solar often knocks them down to close to zero or under.

In places like Pacifica, The Sunset District in SF, and most coastal towns, the return on investment is simply not near that of the Central Valley, and may not make it even remotely attractive.

I don't run AC, outside of 3-5 days a year, and my electrical bill is quite low. If I got solar, it would amortize long after my departure from this world.
Click to expand...
Absolutely and a good point. :thumbup

Down here in Fresno/Clovis we had 48 days over 100 last summer. You definitely want solar down here. Where we lived before, up in the Bay Area, solar probably wasn't nearly as necesary.
 
motomania2007 said:
I paid my friend, a solar installer, $1500 for the plans, the paperwork for the permits, getting approval from PG&E and I bought all the solar components through him (he made about 10% commission on the inverter and panels). I bought wire, conduit, etc at Lowes.

I toured 3 of his installations.

I worked on it on several mornings and it took me a total of about 20 hours of work to install my 29 panel 8kw system.

It was pretty much like legos. Plug and play.

The building inspector told me my install was cleaner and better organized than most solar panel installations he had inspected.

We went from $300-600/month electric bills to about $1000 FOR THE YEAR on the first year and only about $100-150 per year since. We replaced our 35+ year old HVAC system with much more efficient modern HVAC system and that accounts for most of our savings after the first year.

Total cost of my 8kw solar system was about $18k plus my labor to install it.

My friend quoted me a 2 day installation with 3 workers, for $6k.

If you average out our electric bills to $400 a month equals our solar system was paid for in about 48 months.
Click to expand...

George- did you switch from a natural gas (or propane) water heater to electric at the same time too? Long time, hope all is well.
 
Climber said:
It's automatic. The new buyer HAS to take over the solar lease, along with the same solar contract. IT's a shitshow that reduces the value of the house because the lease payments go up by 2.9% every year, which means that the seller got cheaper payments than the buyer will have to inherit.

There is no happy endings with leased solar. It absolutely sucks, by design.
Click to expand...

2.9% is an odd number, only in that its roughly the same as the productivity decline per year for solar panels...(or was 5 years ago, may not be so bad now).
 
berth said:
This is pretty much what I paid a vendor for our house last year, only it's a 7500w system. There was a bunch of hassle with our system, the install is on two roofs, I have all the wiring indoors, the attic is particularly cramped (one of the workers had a bout of claustrophobia during the install), and everything else, it was worth 6K or so to have it done for me.

We have two banks, the switch gear, a cellular maintenance device broadcasting to the "cloud" to an app on my phone.
Click to expand...

Solar is getting cheaper all the time. Keep in mind, my solar was installed in 2016.
 
kingmoochr said:
Gotcha, a little more exposure than a few YouTube videos... lol. My struggle is the cost/benefit. Our bill only hits $300 when we've got heavy furnace use. And it's a pretty even 50/50 split between electricity and gas. We've got gas furnace, water heater and stove. It'll probably only become worthwhile if we were to swap to electric appliances in the future....or get electric cars.
Click to expand...

Our house is100% electric powered: HVAC, water heater, well, pool...
 
NorCalBusa said:
2.9% is an odd number, only in that its roughly the same as the productivity decline per year for solar panels...(or was 5 years ago, may not be so bad now).
Click to expand...
I'm not sure how they arrived at that number, but it's a dirty trick because the numbers look great up front but are heavily back-loaded so what you're paying at first gets doubled by the time you are in the final years. And, yeah, by then when you're baying twice as much you're likely getting half as much electrical generation. But like car sales tricks, this is a trick and they only mention the starting price, which looks pretty good. But with the lower price up front your principle is barely dropping, looking you in even harder against a buy-out.
 
Also, look at the utility escalation rate that some estimates use for their payoff calculations. I've seen some people try to sneak by an escalation of 15%, PG&E doesn't go up that much a year.
 
motomania2007 said:
Our house is100% electric powered: HVAC, water heater, well, pool...
Click to expand...

Plus central valley... that makes a lot more sense...I was hoping to get something going for @10k w/a battery for outages and future car fueling. I guess I'll wait until I have the need.
 
wazzuFreddo said:
Also, look at the utility escalation rate that some estimates use for their payoff calculations. I've seen some people try to sneak by an escalation of 15%, PG&E doesn't go up that much a year.
Click to expand...

PG&E says, "Hold my beer".

And if the state takes over- watch for all sorts of "well, we have to this and that" expenses through the roof.
 
Tesla Solar Energy wants $8000 extra to finance the purchase which is ridiculous. I can borrow the money for less at a higher interest rate than 0.99 because I won't need to borrow $8000 extra and I'll get $5000 back from federal credits. I mean I'd do it if they don't want to rip me off...but they won't likely waive the $8000 extra.
 
HappyHighwayman said:
Tesla Solar Energy wants $8000 extra to finance the purchase which is ridiculous. I can borrow the money for less at a higher interest rate than 0.99 because I won't need to borrow $8000 extra and I'll get $5000 back from federal credits. I mean I'd do it if they don't want to rip me off...but they won't likely waive the $8000 extra.
Click to expand...

This is how solar financing works with most companies and is pretty standard.

Get a HELOC if you want to pay the least.
 
mrzuzzo said:
This is how solar financing works with most companies and is pretty standard.

Get a HELOC if you want to pay the least.
Click to expand...

I get that but what other industries do this? Like I said I can borrow $20,000 at 7.25% and it woukd be cheaper than $28,0000 at their 0.99 %
 
HappyHighwayman said:
I get that but what other industries do this? Like I said I can borrow $20,000 at 7.25% and it woukd be cheaper than $28,0000 at their 0.99 %
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's a solar industry thing. Unfortunately, that is how it is. I wouldn't say it's a scam or them trying to rip you off, that's just the only financing they can offer directly. I'm not sure why it's like that.
 
So with the house refinance I may be saving a lot of short term cash so I'd have at least $8000 ready to spend on it.

I'm still doing the breakdown.
 
I needed my roof replaced, in part because the 15yr-old solar mounts were leaking. Roofing companies wanted an extra $5k to unmount and remount the solar - without changing any mounts. So first lesson there is don't install solar on an old roof. Second lesson is don't get ripped off by roofing companies.

In the end, a handyman friend replaced the roof. I helped with the unmount and remount, sourced the new solar mounts, and helped with the changes to the wiring. I also installed a new inverter because the old one was dead. After all that I agree w/ motomania. The solar part is easy - pretty much legos. The roof part is more difficult, but still not bad. The latest mounts mostly just slide under the shingles and get bolted down. If you can find the studs and use a caulk gun, its fine.

When the inverted was busted, our power bill was <$150/mon. Its silly that this house came with 28 panels :laughing. If you don't have AC and/or a pool, solar might not be for you.
 
Last edited:
I don't use air conditioning. I have heating but use is sparingly I keep it at like 68 :)

I do have 2 Mac Minis runniung 24/7, 1 fridge, 2 mini fridge and a chest freezer running 24/7 too. Plus the grow tent sometimes.

I seem to use an average of 800 kwh per month based on 2 years useage.
 
kingmoochr said:
Plus central valley... that makes a lot more sense...I was hoping to get something going for @10k w/a battery for outages and future car fueling. I guess I'll wait until I have the need.
Click to expand...

We considered doing a battery backup but it really doesn't make fiscal sense. significant battery and the inverter and all that equipment and everything you're going to be spending something on the order of $2000 or more depending on how much capacity you want. And in reality it probably would have been substantially more than that. So what I did was I bought a 12 kW generator that cost me a little over $1,000. I installed it in a way that I just plug it in instead of my solar panels and you disconnect the main to the PG&E grid before you turn on the generator and 12 kW is more than enough. In fact our peak demand is something on the order of about 7 kW but an 8 kW generator was only about $150 cheaper so I figured a larger generator would be better because I'm stressing it less. I've test run the system a few times It works great it's simple It was easy to do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top