Well, to be accurate it's not I who bought it but rather a Bloomberg reporter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/grap...sunrun-solar-panels/

A home in my densely packed neighborhood is getting solar panels installed. It's the first one I've seen here. My first thought was "aw, now all your neighbors are going to think you're stupid".

WTG, thank you for posting this! It's super timely as we're getting ready to buy a house and I have seen listings advertising solar panels already installed as a selling point.

As it happen, no houses we've been interested in have had panels, but I'm seeing them more and more around here. Once we become homeowners, I imagine we'll start being targeted by solar panel sellers. Now I have enough knowledge to be super skeptical!

Horace,

quote:

"aw, now all your neighbors are going to think you're stupid".

How so? Is it because the housing density, or tree placement, means that house doesn't get good sunlight?

I'm guessing that the issues vary by state, but I'm glad you got something of value from the article.

I have an acquaintance who has taken up the solar panel cause in Illinois. He's been working on legislative issues relating to what happens when you generate more power than you use. At the time he started, I believe you were basically giving the excess to the utility for free because they weren't *required* to give you credit for power you generated. I haven't been following the story closely, but I think that's changed now because of Peter's efforts.

For myself, the jury is out on solar panels for a variety of reasons. But I've only skimmed the surface of the topic.

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
WTG, thank you for posting this! It's super timely as we're getting ready to buy a house and I have seen listings advertising solar panels already installed as a selling point.

As it happen, no houses we've been interested in have had panels, but I'm seeing them more and more around here. Once we become homeowners, I imagine we'll start being targeted by solar panel sellers. Now I have enough knowledge to be super skeptical!

Horace,

quote:

"aw, now all your neighbors are going to think you're stupid".

How so? Is it because the housing density, or tree placement, means that house doesn't get good sunlight?

The solar panel salesmen are like multi-level marketers around here. They are just this side of scammers. I don't think solar panels make economic sense. They take a very long time to pay for themselves and the marketing gimmicks used to sell them are stupid things designed to convince stupid people. It made me feel dirty listening to a solar panel pitch once, though I can't remember much about the specifics.

Horace, thanks for those comments.

quote:

The solar panel salesmen are like multi-
level marketers around here.

Yikes! Although, having read the article that WTG posted, that sounds about right. Unfortunately.

quote:

For myself, the jury is out on solar panels for a variety of reasons.

Me too, WTG. I really like the idea in theory, but I have a lot of questions, and more after the article you posted, that I would have to get satisfactorily answered before I would go and get them on my own roof.

And, given that we might end up moving sometime in the future, and would then want to sell the house, I will be even more cautious because I wouldn't want to do anything to diminish the value and ease of reselling the house.

I felt like living without solar panels in Florida was a waste of abundant sunshine, but I had the good luck to talk to an ethical salesperson. He could probably afford to be, because his business seemed to be dominated by solar pool heaters, which do work with reasonable economy. In any case, a warm pool is a luxury item, so I'm not sure "payoff period" means anything. People with gas heaters have to make a monetary decision every time they turn it on. People with solar heaters can heat their pools at will at little cost beyond the initial investment, so it's hard to assess the value of the extra days you can use your pool.

Anyway, we bought the solar pool system. I asked him about solar water heaters for the house, because it was my impression that they had a reasonable payback period. He said that, if it were him, he'd wait until one of the traditional water heaters failed and then replace it with a solar one so that I didn't lose the value of its remaining life.

He thought we had too many trees to make a photoelectric system viable. Coincidentally, I saw a Facebook post this morning from an acquaintance who's a bit of a survivalist. He said that today was the first day of 2019 that all of his power came from his solar system. If he's off the grid for nine to ten months a year, I'd guess that his system probably paid for itself pretty quickly but that depends on how much electricity he uses. He lives simply, so it may not be all that much. He lives on acreage outside town, so his system is probably not limited to his roof and, as I remember it from the one time I visited, he had a lot of property without trees.

We have no trees to speak of here, and I suspect we get enough sunshine seven or eight months of year to make a lot of electricity, but I think we'd need more area than our roof and we don't have the space to have a lot of panels elsewhere. Our rates are relatively low, so that would argue against it being cost-effective.

Very interesting.

Here at 47 degrees north, I still see solar panels as a novelty and a symbolic act, not a practical way to reduce one's electric bill significantly.

The prices for solar systems are still coming down, although Individual 1's tariffs are having an effect since, last time I looked, most panels are coming from China. As the article mentions, appliances are getting more efficient. I have switched over about half of my light bulbs to LEDs; nearly all the rest are CFLs. It seems the best way to reduce one's electric bill is still to reduce consumption.

If I were to go solar now, I would pay look at a home-improvement loan and buy a system outright. Or simply buy as much generating capacity as I could with available cash. That's the only thing that makes sense to me.

The economics of solar depend largely on how much power costs in your particular area. If we weren't planning to move in a few years I would have panels on my house.

They are very popular in South OC where SDG&E has introduced Time-of-Use rates that top $.50 per KWH on peak, with plans in place to raise rates again in the near future. Our top Edison rate is about $.36 and even at that paybacks are pretty reasonable. More rate hikes are predicted and I expect to see more solar panels being installed in the future.

It will be interesting to see what happens north of here. PG&E is on the hook for the damage caused by the Paradise fire and the cost of that will certainly be passed on to ratepayers. Solar panels should start looking pretty good at that point.

They are everywhere on my neighborhood ( north of Boston)

Would take too long to recover (20 yrs plus) for me even with my electric heat. Cost plus new roof. Well I need a new roof anyway but I am getting too old for it to make a difference.

5 houses just on my street.

For me, passing on solar was an easy decision: I don't buy things I don't understand.

I could barely follow the concepts in the article, so that makes it a non-starter.

Then when you tell me that it will take years or decades to break even *and* some soul-less corporation has the power to change the deal either because of contract language or lobbying power *and* my remedy is arbitration . . . It's a hard no.

A solar panel installer company tried to pitch me a substantially similar deal, complete with state subsidies for installation costs. I immediately felt unformfotable with the third-party ownership model and the effect it would have on resale, the long multi-decade commitment, and after I ran the numbers on my own after the salesperson left, it became quite obvious that whatever "savings" was promised, it's just not worth the hassle.

"The average residential electricity rate in Honolulu is 35.1¢/kWh. This average (residential) electricity rate in Honolulu is 6% less than the Hawaii average rate of 37.34¢/kWh. The average (residential) electricity rate in Honolulu is 195.45% greater than the national average rate of 11.88¢/kWh."

https://www.electricitylocal.c...tes/hawaii/honolulu/

My father pays $.11, $.08 at night in NYS.

Solar power in the tropics more than pays for itself.

I saw a meme yesterday that said,

"Solar power--it's nuclear fusion from a safe distance."