I'm interested in hearing how this works out for you. Are they on your roof, backyard or what? What kind of dollar amount do you save monthly? What did you learn from the experience?
Pete,
My DH and I are so excited about our SUNPOWER solar panels. We interviewed three contractors before choosing ours. Basically, you provide 12 months (recent) of electric bills. They analyze it (cost, daily usage, etc.), look at which direction your roof faces, and how much you would like to reduce your current bill. Our twelve months came up with about $3100 spent annually. We decided we wanted to reduce it by 80%. They tell you how many panels that would take and how much that would cost you. So, ours was rather costly, but will pay for itself in 11 yrs. We could have been happy with reducing it only 50% or less and paid much less. The feds are giving incredible incentives to "go green", but the incentives are shrinking as it becomes more and more popular. Our incentive was around 14,000 dollars. If we ever get a solar powered car, we can plug it into our system rather than pay someone else at their elevated price!
We have a two story home. The panels are installed flat, elevated off the tile because they need a bit of ventilation to stay cool, over our tile roof facing the backyard. We had to drive around the block and peek between the houses to actually see the panels.
We are very excited about our solar system. We did quite a bit of research before making our decision on using solar, and choosing SUNPOWER. What did we learn? We learned that not every solar contractor will tell you the truth. We nearly got ripped off. SO YOU GOTTA DO YOUR RESEARCH.
Also, we no longer pay a MONTHLY electric bill. Its called net metering. We see a monthly analysis and pay a final bill every 12 months. We were seeing an average of about $225 per month.
