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The guys at SolarCity finally finished installing my Evergreen Solar panel system yesterday. Even with both of our old A/C units running the electrical meter was spinning backwards quite rapidly! Now, I just need an electric car I can charge with my panels and I can stop sending my money to petro-dictators and suicide bombers.
It is a 5.3 KWh system from Evergreen Solar (ticker ESLR if you want to trade their stock). Because of our less-than-perfect position relative to the sun we generate about 4.8 KWh at peak times but it's plenty enough to drastically reduce our electric bill from about $250/mo to $20/mo.
I bought it through SolarCity, who provided the financing ($0 down, 15-yr lease) and installation. The recovery costs are immediate: my lease payment is less than the amount I save in electrical costs from Southern California Edison.
If you're interested contact Sean Maez at [email protected] and mention you were referred to him from "Scott Hodson", I get a referral credit if you sign up
I don't have any pictures, I'll see if I can get some together. Half of the panels are on a part of the roof I can't see from the ground, maybe they'll show up on Google Earth some day soon
So I guess as energy becomes more expensive, you stand to get a check back from Edison instead of paying $20, right? That would be quite awesome.
Here in Texas I would be very concerned about storms. We often have very large hail (golfball to baseball size, sometimes bigger) and I wonder if they can stand up that kind of punishment?
There's no warranties. I mean, if the system stops working they (Solar City) need to fix it per the lease agreement, but there's no guarantees of how much energy will be generated or how much money I will save. Because I am leasing them I don't own them, they do, and they monitor the system remotely.
Yeah, besides the savings it's also a hedge against higher electricity prices in the future.
I asked about wind and storms and they say the mounts can handle more than twice the force of a Katrina-sized hurricane.
The cost is $0 up-front. The monthly payments depends on the size of your system. You should contact Sean Maez at [email protected] as they will work with you to size up a system relative to your electrical usage and local provider. Their goal is not to get your electrical cost to $0, rather, they want to get you to the lowest pricing tier where the unit cost of electricity is the cheapest. At that point you get diminishing returns on a system larger than that.
I was on vacation on Lake Powell last week at it was nice to know my electrical meter was spinning backwards all week while I was on vacation. It's common to see it spinning backwards in the middle of the day even when we have both A/C units running full blast on a hot day.
Here's a recent electric bill: $1.05. You can see the previous month is was $18+. In the summer we're used to paying $200-$300/mo thanks to our house having 2 AC units and getting screwed by Enron with horrible 10-year electricity deals the state got into few years back.