Posted on 11/25/2021 12:45:48 PM PST by Captain Peter Blood
I have been researching putting Solar Panels on my home and would like to know out there who has done this. How did it work out and what suggestions or opinions do you have.
I live in Arkansas and my home seems to be a good candidate for Solar Panels, it is finding the right company and getting the price that makes sense.
So far on Monday I dealt with a company here in Arkansas and I received a estimate for $35,000, without a battery backup system. That would cost and extra $25,000. Well I can't make those numbers work even without the battery backup system.
The recommendation was for about a 9.62 KW system.
The plusses on any Solar System are a 26% Tax Credit on the cost of the system, plus my energy provider, Entergy, would buy my excess electricity and run that as a credit on my monthly Bill.
After talking to this first company I decided to see what Tesla had to offer just as a comparison. Their bid was about $21,000 including the Backup Battery System. Huge difference here and I can make those numbers work for me.
So now I have something to compare to and will look at other installers in my area to see what the average deals are. Not sure Tesla even has a company they affiliate with in my state. Will find out.
I sent the Tesla bid to the first company I talked to and told them if they could match this we might be able to do business. Of course I have yet to hear back and probably will not.
While I personally would never do it, at least you’re trying to make an informed decision. If you’re thinking about a set for the roof on your home, have someone knowledgeable evaluate that it can support the extra weight. Being in Arkansas, I’m assuming snow is a low risk but that adds weight as well. Also, if you have a storm that damages your roof, will your insurance pay to have someone take them off to fix the roof or re-shingle it?
Make sure your utility support “net metering” where you’re being paid for any surplus electricity but back onto the grid.
Best of luck to you.
Lot of folks think the electricity generated is enough to start and run their AC too (it can’t).
We just put them on our house, with a battery.
I am 66. My wife is 62.
It’s Thanksgiving.
Check your private replies tomorrow.
Not going to arbitrate this on a public thread.
Only as a novelty and ability to thumb your nose just a little at the power company. Even with increasing rates it is close to a wash if you have the work done. If you can do it yourself and access used panels and a tie system it makes sense but just barely.
This is all in broad general terms of course. YMMV.
I’ve considered about 7-10 kW to keep it within my barn’s backfeed capability without having to string 50A cable. A friend did it and he has generated 3,000 kWh since summer started with a 7 kW system. My average monthly demand is about 1,300 kWh so you have to go a long way to replace your needs in most cases.
We paid billions for DOE to sponsor all kinds of studies and make all kinds of calculators but you can’t find a one of them on their web site. I can’t anyway. More of my money, pissed away.
Consider the type of roof you have. You want one (a metal roof) that will outlast the life of your panels. Otherwise, you will have to dismount the entire solar panel system in order to put on a new roof.
Good.
Greenies. Certainly govt. subsidies are helping those Solar Farms. In AZ, they subsidize the purchase, but I still wouldn't touch 'em.
Unless you are truly off grid it will not be worth it. However if you want off grid pay or it. I am completely off grid for my home so it made sense. But I live meager. If I had the option of a hookup to the main grid I would have done it. If you want a backup buy a battery bank and charge it on grid power. Before you spend the money do the math. As others said you will never get the money back so only you can decide if you want the offgrid luxury.
I am not very interested in solar power ( electricity, ) but I am going to mention something which no one else has mentioned. I am considering the solar water heater on the roof. That may cut some dollars off of the electricity bill.
If you just want to tinker with the technology set up a shed or a portable batter bank you can take camping, put on a trailer, or run a pump to see if it something you are interested in.
I have had a 9.62 Kw system for four years. Still have a $900 credit with the power company which buys excess back at the same rate as they charge for use. Cautions: Make sure your roof is new or nearly new before you have panels installed (I have a metal roof with a 50 year warranty). Also, pay cash and ask for a cash discount rather than financing through them or a finance company. (note that if you are required to take money out of a 401k, use that method because the energy credit, now 26%, will probably easily cover the taxes you would be required to pay on the withdrawal). Make sure that you have a good warranty on the control unit which includes the concentrator, monitor and control, generator/inverter components (at least 7-10 years). Also ensure the inverter is rated to handle 25% more than the expected highest peak hourly Kw production load - which is based upon your # of panels and panel hourly Kw peak generation). Timing your installation during the slow season can also lower your costs if you can haggle a bit. A batter backup system to power the control unit and system (not a total battery off the grid system) is a good idea if you can afford it. My system has averaged 10 megawatts per year for the last four years. Most important is to select a company that will be around to support the system and honor the warranties. Get a list of their previous installs and contact them to see what is real and not.
Solar panels are terribly inefficient. Unless you want a 12-16 volt DC light and appliance system they really don’t make sense.
If you have a cabin and use propane as heat up in the mountains where air conditioning is seldom needed, they will never be primary power system.
The efficiency of converting from 12-16 volts DC to AC is less than 50% and it is square wave AC and is not synced to the phase of your electrical power.
Solar panels are great for remote locations with low power consumption. (radio sites, small cabins, and on other exotic places)
There are some good comments here and several have to do with the question of “why do it”. For me, the answer to that question is twofold and they are related…1. Putting my home’s utilities under my control is something that can technically be done and this is the type of project that interests me because it is personally rewarding in terms of achievement and bragging rights, and 2. I have zero confidence in the longterm electrical generating supply of the grid from a reliability and cost perspective. I could deal with that topic at some length but that would chew up too much time. Having one’s own utilities under your control means you aren’t dependent on others who are not reliable (and if they aren’t unreliable yet, just wait… they will be). For those who talk ‘payback’, try working in the cost of all of a sudden dealing with a totally unreliable grid and dealing with that problem at the same time everyone else is trying to deal with it.
It sounds like you have an existing home as opposed to putting up a new house. This makes a huge difference in how the issue of solar panels is approached but regardless, just remember this…. If you were attempting to build an off-grid home (and my advice is to at least treat it that way even if you have an existing house), there are three rules as to how the energy supply method is approached. The most important rule by far (to the point of dwarfing Rules 2 and 3) is Rule No. 1… The very first to do is to sort out how to optimize your electrical use. By ‘optimize’, that could be interpreted as ‘minimized’ but that’s not what this means.
At the very outset of the project on your current home, do a complete audit of all your electrical use. If at all possible, get some power meters and track your power trends both for the whole house and for as many of the individual electrical energy users as possible (starting with the largest ones). This will cost a bit of money but in the end, the data that it provides is invaluable.
- Simply knowing how many kWh you use in a month is useful but it is not very helpful as far as establishing the peak kW loads and other important details… particularly the issue of when power is typically generated versus when you use it. You want to know the day by day breakdown and to do it right, you want to know the hour by hour breakdown and perhaps even finer resolution.
- Once you have your trends, you want to know what went into them… What got switched on (manually or automatically), how much power did it take and was it the same for the time it was on, how long did it stay on, was this a device that could easily be shifted to an alternate time if one was trying to drop their peak load etc. For a period of time, keep detailed records and do the necessary analysis to figure this out. Ideally, you should have a year of data so that the trends incorporate seasonality issues… that doesn’t work well if you want to start on this tomorrow.
- There may be quite a few electrical loads that can be shifted to other forms of energy. Here’s a big one… do you have an electrical water heater? Does it make sense to shift that load to natural gas or propane (assuming that is available). In my house I have both and electric and a natural gas water heater so that there is flexibility .
- It is very important to analyze every single device to figure out whether it is one that makes sense from an electrical use. Here’s an example…. I’ve seen some very large TVs that take huge amount of electricity. You are better off getting rid of one of those and spending the money to get a more efficient one… and there is no need to suffer a reduction in quality, in fact it should be better. The same is true with refrigerators… there are some that take almost no electricity. Similarly with lights… LED lights take a fraction of the energy of the older technologies of lights. What you want to do is minimize your electrical use without losing anything as far as your lifestyle. Spend the money to insulate your house more thoroughly… there is no point to spending a gazillion dollars on a new system only to leak energy away that was used for heating or cooling. You need to know exactly how efficient your air conditioner is. If you have electric heaters, see what you have to do to get rid of them.
Your ultimate goal is to minimize your requirements to the extent that is practical… a 5 kW system is way cheaper than a 10 kW system, a 10 kW is way cheaper than a 20 kW system..... to buy, to install, to maintain, to replace etc. The smaller system needs less roof space (if that’s where you intend to put it) and for the most part, only south facing roofs are viable for solar.
To put all that I said another way, when it comes to solar (or any energy for that matter), the cheapest energy is the energy that you don’t have to buy.
Except in the aftermath of a hurricane, your panels may be scattered over a several block area.
Actually they can depending on your A/C system and how the Solar System is built...
Here is a nice video from a YouTube Channel called Engineer775 where he starts a 5 ton a/c unit on nothing but solar totally off grid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clNh1tjUbZE&t=1376s
You could also use mini-split A/C systems which can easily be run on Solar....
So yes, some thing can’t be started with solar but with proper design you can have A/C and Solar...
Avg. payback (ROI) is 25 years.
No business can survive making investments like that.
Not likely where I live, I don’t live near the ocean and even a Cat 5 will be severely downgraded by the time it gets to me.....the biggest issue where I live is downed trees in the area taking down the grid, living in the country puts you on the bottom of the list when restoring power....
As some including me have said it’s not a business decision it’s a lifestyle decision...people make decisions all the time that don’t have any ROI, things like type car you drive, size of your house, types of vacation you go on, etc....
In some areas, like Florida, solar has the benefit of being a backup for when conventional grid power goes down in a hurricane — assuming of course that the solar system itself is undamaged in the storm.
Solar is good for off the grid. Do the long term non common core math and you’ll see it’s a fat loser otherwise. Unless of course youre eco woke and need to feel good about yourself.
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