Do you have solar on your home? If so, how do you like it and was it worth the investment?

9 comments

1. I personally collect rain water in a 55 gallon drum I use to water vegetables. I’d love solar but I don’t think it would be feasible here on my property.

2. I’d love solar especially in case of power outages but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. Well I’d need to get the house evaluated to see if it even could feasibly be worthwhile to put some panels on the roof.

3. No. I did work for a company that build a 5 million dollar house that was completely solar.

4. I installed my own solar panels. It was fairly straightforward and easy because my roof is plain and low slope

   I wouldn’t do it if I had to go through a company. All the ones around here are ridiculously overpriced

5. No

6. I do not, but wish I could. I’ve got an electric car though. My issue is that the side of my roof that faces the sun most of the year is blocked by county-owned trees, which I can’t trim or cut down. So it would be worthless to me to install solar (maybe not entirely worthless, but I’d never recoup the costs, maybe only get a few kWh per day in the spring/summer/fall due to tree cover)

7. We got solar installed this summer, energized this fall. I like it so far. I didn’t get a battery so I’m still dependent on the utility. I live in southern Arizona and it’s a new neighborhood so the door to door solar salespeople are like locusts. Do not accept their offers. The door to door bid we got was $9K higher (~50% more) than who we went with and we got a bigger system.

   As I said, we live in southern Arizona, so our yard is all rock, desert tolerant plants, paver patio, and a patch of very lush fake grass. I love the lower maintenance.

   I’m thinking of rain harvesting for watering the plants and looking into gray water harvesting.

8. We got solar in the spring. We still get a bill from the electric company that ranges from $40-80 per month. There’s a law here that doesn’t allow us to be off grid.. net metering. Financially, it’s pretty much a wash. We did get a large tax break for installing, so I have to take that into account. I wouldn’t say I regret it, but it’s not as big of savings as we expected it to be. There are A LOT of scammy companies in the solar industry, so do your research and choose wisely.

9. I have a grid-tied ground-mounted array of 16 300W panels with a 3850W inverter. The panels are never in the shade of trees or buildings. Since they’re on the ground, it’s easy to wash off the dust (dirt roads on 2 sides). On a perfect day, they’ll make about 32 kWh. Average production ranges from about 22 kWh/day in January to about 31 kWh/day in May. Our electrician did a very good job of sizing it correctly, as we are always within +/- $15/month of our usage. Payoff time should be around 12 years.

   We have no grass except that which manages to survive without watering it. I’m cutting down all trees that aren’t native to the desert and replacing them with more appropriate plants. The only plants that we water in the conventional sense are the vegetable garden (256 ft^2) and some rose bushes. We have some non-code-compliant plumbing that causes the kitchen sink drain to water some shade trees near the patio.