Quote Originally Posted by Great-Kazoo View Post
Agreed. However until they lower the price that's affordable i'm not interested. You do the numbers of overall cost vs return on savings, it doesn't add up. Lowest price we were quoted was $125 monthly as payments. That's more in 1 month than our total utilities are over 3. I'm sure there's low budget options, however they don't seem to be offering it to the public.
Most people don't understand that the lease option isn't usually going to save someone money...

The "lease" business model makes sense for only one group... The group that is leasing the panels.

Lets look at some of the issues:

1. Inefficiency of panels when not installed properly.
- Look at where these panels are installed on most of these "lease systems". They aren't installed facing due south with the appropriate angle for this area (26* to 73* depending on season). They are stuck on the roof of the house, to match the pitch of the roof, and whatever direction it faces. This causes the panels to be far less efficient than they could be.
2. Spacial Efficiency of panels:
- Most of these groups are using low cost thin film, or perhaps a touch better, panels, which means that you are going to get about 60W per 3x3 panel. It takes a lot of 60W panels to make any significant amount of energy.
3. Grid tie distributed generation systems:
- Most of these lease groups don't tell their customers that the power company doesn't have to take the energy produced off their roof. They are only going to take the energy during peak use to offset their cost of generating it.
- Given this, when is the most common peak use? When the sun is out? Not usually.

Basically, they hamstring the capability of the solar panels to produce, and then offer the electricity to someone that doesn't have to take it.

I need to hire some of the sales people they employ... They must be dang good at their job.