Sheryl, here's the search we used on eBay:
(solar, solor) panel -LED -LEDs -Golf -36LEDs -garden -CD -pond -hop -fountain -radio -plasma -clock -hat -welding -camera -game -dive -Mavica
and it still turned up over 400 hits every week. People put the word "solar" in the damndest things but we didn't want to miss the real deals from blissfully ignorant newbies who couldn't spell or who didn't know what category "solar panels" should go in.
We found four 50-watt panels with a
"Wanted" ad on Craigslist and we came close on a couple eBay auctions. The best deals were from people who'd bought their systems and then moved or changed their plans and were just trying to recover some of their investment. Many of them have their own eBay businesses and they wouldn't be around very long if they cheated you on a panel sale. It's just not worth their risk of being banned. Craigslist is about as safe as a newspaper's classified ads, though, and I'm real quick with a voltmeter now. But you could usually tell within the first minute of seeing the customer whether this was going to be worth the effort.
The
company that sold us the final 16 panels didn't actually have an auction, it was "Buy It Now." They're just flipping pallets of 28 blemished panels that came from Evergreen but I guess not too many people are willing to pay $11K for an eBay purchase like that. When I called to see if they'd break up the set they processed my credit card over the phone. Again they do a lot of business on eBay, they have a high rating, and they can make far more money from being honest than they can from ripping us off. They've said on their auction that the panels are still fully rated & under warranty and I can do a credit-card chargeback if there's a problem. Shipping includes insurance. These are just blemished goods, and it's not much different from buying flawed jeans at Ross Dress For Less. But we'll see what the panels test out to when they arrive.
The key to the credit is when you put the panels in service, and the cost is the bill of sale/charge receipt. You could theoretically buy your entire array, have the whole thing bolted together, wire half of it to the inverter in 2006, wire the other half in 2007, and take the deduction in both years. It's a bit expensive to buy a bunch of panels and then let them sit idle for a year just for the credit, but you'd have to do the math to see if waiting the extra year for $2000 is worth the hassle of leaving it idle. Your money spent in 2005 might not earn that credit until as late as Apr 2008. I have no idea what PV panel prices will be like in 2007 but it's entirely possible that the initial surge will have passed and prices will be back to "normal".
"Green tags" sound like a great idea. Hawaii uses net metering to encourage residential solar so that they don't have to build a new power plant. We're only compensated on our monthly bill so there's no incentive to produce more than you can use. If we wanted to sell it back to the utility we could, but by today's laws they'd sell us our residential service at the residential rate of 16 cents/KWHr and buy our excess back at the wholesale rate of about 4 cents/KWHr. Right now that only works for big businesses. But if the law changes...
Our system is a grid-tie with no batteries. We use HECO's rock-steady bus voltage to avoid having to worry about voltage droops from the fridge or the electric dryer starting up. You could avoid the net-metering hassle completely if you went off the grid, but you'll need a battery bank ($$), a low-surge refrigerator ($$), and probably a backup diesel generator ($$$). Higher initial expenses, perhaps, but the payback will be just as fast and you won't have any ties to the electric company. You might even be the only person on your street with electricity after the hurricane, as long as the flying debris didn't smash your expensive panels into glass shards.
Right now our 1100-watt system saves us about $22/month. Ramping up to 3000 watts will save us about $60/month. We typically use $60/month electricity in the winter, a bit more in the summer (ceiling fans). We're also putting together a cheap solar water heating system that should take care of the last $10-$15/month. Since we bought cheap used water collectors and heater, our outlay will be under $500 and payback on the water heating system will be about five years (if it doesn't break down!)
By now you know that I tend to do these things as much for my inner nuclear engineer the challenge of the project as for the financial return. If you don't get all tingly with excitement at the idea of drilling holes in your roof and hooking up 600 VDC wiring then you should hire a solar contractor. The guy that did our electrical hookup has
a great website explaining the options without the usual marketing hype. I still haven't gotten around to plugging our inverter's RJ45 connection into our computer and monitoring the array in real time.
I'll put up more photos when we finish, but here's how
the array looks now. I can also e-mail you a messy Excel spreadsheet that attempts to calculate the solar payback vs the opportunity cost of investing the money. It's not pretty but I believe the math is correct.