() said:
Maybe i'm tired, although Mr. Gabe has been sleeping all night lately, but he likes waking up at 5am regardless, but wouldnt it be a 10% dividend AFTER I get my money back from the install? In the interrim, wouldnt I be losing the 5-6% lost opportunity on the money until its paid back?
Hey, I've used that chronic fatigue excuse millions of times. Don't wear it out!
I'm just likening solar arrays to a stock or a commodity fund with a nice dividend. You earn a dividend on the Dow Select Dividend ETF (DVY) when you buy the shares and hold them past the ex-dividend date. You don't get your money back on those shares until you sell them (and maybe not even then), and you also have a 5-6% opportunity cost on that money. I wouldn't torture the analogy any further than to point out that both end up spending money in the expectation of getting a small percentage of it back as monthly income (or monthly expense reduction).
() said:
Do you REALLY get the money back on resale? I've never bought or sold a house with a PVA on it.
Me either. Two local guys have made more than their initial PV investment selling their homes but we can't tell you that it was an array more than the appreciation of local real estate. $20K is practically a rounding error in a $500K home sale.
I CAN tell you that they heavily advertised their arrays (one guy even wrote articles in the local papers and gave a talk at the local library on equipping your own home with a PV array) and created a lot of buzz at their open houses. I'm sure some poor fool prescient speculator bought for the "solar ambience" as much as for the neighborhood location, good schools, quality construction, and other more important factors.
() said:
As far as buying last years model...any tips on doing that? I just skimmed a dozen or so sites and the install cost for the 3kw array were all around 30k (which given my experience with sales people means 40k) and california gives you back about half of that in rebates. I could go smaller than that, but in the midst of summer when our electricity is the highest, even a 3kw array would only give us about half of our total electric bill. 105 degree heat that starts out at 80 at 8 in the morning takes a lot to overcome...based on the cool graphs one company's web site gave me, our meter would never actually 'run backwards' until I got up into the 4.5-5kw array. I dont have enough southern roof for that.
We scored our first 1.1 Kw through the newspaper classified ads and we keep looking. We see arrays in our neighborhood and put notes in their mailboxes ("If you're replacing your roof or upgrading, we'd like to buy your old panels"). I'm also scouring craigslist and local boards for arrays being sold by sailors and landscapers (people actually buy PV panels to run their waterfall pumps). I have yet to go to our local retailer (Interisland Solar Supply) and beg them to discount their clearance stock to us.
The biggest cost of the initial installation is the inverter (which you probably have to buy retail, it's certainly worth it for the technology upgrade) and it's quite easy to add more panels to the inverter's capacity. Our Xantrex is loafing along with that 1.1 KW and we strung enough wiring to be able to load it up to its 3 KW rating.
While it'd be nice to get entirely off the grid, or to sell power back to the grid, we're staying with a grid tie. We don't use A/C so 3 KW will probably handle our home load. But it's not about unloading from the grid, it's about a financial return. If you can find cheap panels and a reasonably inexpensive installer then you can start saving money off your electric bill-- and we're back to the dividend analogy.
We have enough southern roof to get up to about 4 KW, but after that I'd have to mount them in the yard or on top of the walls. Both have been done in homes profiled in magazines like "Home Power". Otherwise we have to wait for power densities to rise enough to match the roof space-- which admittedly could take decades.
() said:
How much wire and whats it look like that runs from the inverter to the power panel? Reason why I ask is because I have a nice hunk of land that gets sun all day on one side of the house, but the power panel is on the opposite side. There are two very substantial clothes line "T" posts over there which would easily support several hundred pounds of array...
That may work quite well.
We used about 500 feet of twisted-strand copper 10 ga wire (I have to look up the exact specs if you're interested) and another 100 feet of solid copper 8 ga ground wire strung through UV-resistant (gray) PVC conduit. Our run from the panels to the inverter was about 80 feet but you could probably go further without substantial voltage loss; we only had a 3V drop over that distance. The individual panels were connected among themselves with about another 100 feet of XLP twisted-strand 10 ga wire (because the wire is exposed to sunlight) and the solid ground wire was routed through lay-in grounding lugs on each PV panel. The panels were just bolted to angle-iron frames resting on brackets bolted right through the shingles into the roof trusses.
If you've done a roof then you know more than I do. You have at least as much mechanical skill as me to handle it all the way up to the point where you're holding two wires and looking for an electrician to plug them into a breaker. Like me you may find a cooperative electrician who'll agree to guide you through the mechanical construction and the code issues (for a suitable fee) while they make the final electrical connections (which PG&E is rather insistent about.) You'll learn enough during the panel hookup to continue on your own when you procure additional panels and what PG&E doesn't know can't hurt you.
I'll do a Photobucket dump later and get back to you with the precise specs. My 12-year-old is standing over my shoulder complaining about her inability to pursue her education while I'm hogging "her" computer...