Getting solar at the house

[meatman]

Personally I'm looking for something with a big up front cost but that makes you basically self sufficient unless you go over production. Probably doesn't exist.

We actually had 3 options when we went with Solar City. We could do the $0.071/kwh + 2.9% increase per year with no money out of pocket which would result in a $62/mo bill to Solar City. The second option was to put down $2k and pay a fixed $0.079/kwh over the 20 years of the contract, $58/mo payable to SC. The third, which we did, was to pay $9500 down and we don't pay electricity for the 20 years of the contract. It should average about $0.042/kwh. Unless we go over our allotted average usage at the end of the year, we don't pay anything. If we produce more than what we use, we'll get credit back from Xcel. I'm not sure if the second and third options are still available. We signed our contract in December. We should reap the benefits in 10 years (come out even).

[gnihcraes]

We actually had 3 options when we went with Solar City. We could do the $0.071/kwh + 2.9% increase per year with no money out of pocket which would result in a $62/mo bill to Solar City. The second option was to put down $2k and pay a fixed $0.079/kwh over the 20 years of the contract, $58/mo payable to SC. The third, which we did, was to pay $9500 down and we don't pay electricity for the 20 years of the contract. It should average about $0.042/kwh. Unless we go over our allotted average usage at the end of the year, we don't pay anything. If we produce more than what we use, we'll get credit back from Xcel. I'm not sure if the second and third options are still available. We signed our contract in December. We should reap the benefits in 10 years (come out even).

How do you like everything otherwise? Good? Bad? Any roof or house issues with it installed? Rain hitting gutters correctly? Snow sliding off in slabs when the sun warms it up?

[meatman]

How do you like everything otherwise? Good? Bad? Any roof or house issues with it installed? Rain hitting gutters correctly? Snow sliding off in slabs when the sun warms it up?

The installation on the system was good. They had some wiring issues in the inverters when they first installed the meters, but that was quickly resolved. We had the panels installed on my barn-style garage because the roof on our old house will probably need replacing in <10 yrs. The garage was built in November. The second pitch on the barn style roof is pretty steep, so there isn't very much snow accumulation on that side. The panels actually seem to catch the snow and just melts instead of coming down in slabs. Rain hits the gutters properly AFAIK. They put squirrel resistant mesh between the panels and the roof to prevent critters from getting behind the panels to chew them up.

I don't have a current picture, but this is one my wife took during the install in April:


For reference, the picture is facing east. There is a set of panels on the top east pitch that cannot be seen from this angle.