Wow, you have a lot of money!
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Well I have a lot less now than I did when I started doing solar.
Different people call a “lot” a different amount. I ended up putting around $50k out and did all the installation myself. Remember the Federal government paid back about a third of that $50k.
Most people pay about half of what they pay for installation so that it is easy to run out of money pretty quickly. I bought a “kit” from Wholesale Solar. They run kits on sale from time to time. If you watch them carefully it is easy to save a good 8-10G’s by getting a close out kit.
A kit generally consists of Solar Cells, the mounting hardware, Combiner boxes and breakers, over voltage protection, Battery Controller, Battery wiring, Inverter(s) and control computer. You provide battery, wiring and junction boxes. It takes a lot of wire.
I have a large home so my electricity costs were often over $400.00 per month and I figured I could kill two birds with one stone, I could get security and lower costs by having solar.
I had already replaced nearly all my incandescent lighting with florescent lighting. When I started calculating my loads I decided it would pay to get rid of my florescent lighting and use LED. The LED is really miserly on using electricity and helps me get the most mileage from my roof. I still have the florescent lamps, I don’t expect to ever use them but to throw away perfectly good lamps was something I just couldn’t do.
I lot of people do it differently, they just lower costs by feeding the meter directly from the PV’s. That is a lot less expensive to do but then you don’t have power in an outage. You could always pay a few grand and get a nice automatic start generator and have your back up. I did the generator, it was overkill big time. What I really wanted is when you know what hits the fan power that would outlast gas supplies.
If you don’t have battery backup you automatically get a 20% advantage in energy production. You gotta figure the battery eats that much. A battery charging eats electricity, low voltage wiring eats voltage so that you need to plan to make at least 20% more than you currently use. If you don’t have a battery all that just goes to the meter. Here in Kentucky the electric company won’t pay you for your extra but they will (at least for now) hold it for you indefinitely and give it back when you need it. The Utilities are all trying to get that changed. I’m grandfathered in now even if they do change the law.
Making my own power is something of a hobby for me now. I have too many hobbies. I play the piano and organ, I am into photography in a big way with Nikon D810 and nice fast lenses and doing my own printing. So all I needed was another hobby.
I do enjoy sharing my experiences with solar with others, it can really be difficult to find much help for whole house solar power, most just want a little backup to keep the freezer and TV going. I like A/C and hot showers.
Great info!
I’m in the mountains too.That morning mist akes quite a difference!
“...did all the installation myself...”
Well, that’s a problem for me. I can’t even change the batteries in a flashlight without killing the thing.
Plus I’m too old now to do much assembling, siting and wiring. Especially if I had to install the panels on my roof.