Giving Back : My Account of Going Solar in MD

[sbelgrave]

Hi everyone,

We recently just completed the process of going Solar (I live in Maryland) so far it's been great. I created a sorta of blog/page with screenshots of our contracts/quotes/power generation statistic to try and record the whole experience. When we were originally considering going Solar I know the most helpful places to me were forums like these along some people that had written down how their experiences with the process. I thought i'd do the same and try to give back to the community a bit. So here goes.

https://plus.google.com/b/100515945614428541074/100515945614428541074/posts

Hopefully someone will find it useful.


Thanks,

Scott

[bhill]

I enjoyed that, thanks for posting!

[sbelgrave]

great

Sure thing Bhill. glad you liked it!

[Naptown]

Just curious as to why you went the lease route.
Generally in Maryland an outright purchase will give a better return in the long run. It is a higher initial outlay however.

[sbelgrave]

Hey Naptown,

Yeah. we had definitely considered that and to be honest it was a hard call for us. I think for us we were just playing it safe since we didn't know how/if much repairs might cost/be neded over 20 years , new inverters etc. and figured we'd rather not have to worry about it. For all i know it wouldn't have been much beyond the replacement cost of our 2 inverters. But no, I think purchasing the system was a wonderful idea.

[Ian S]

Thanks for your interesting account. I also got prepaid lease quotes from SolarCity and Sungevity and ultimately went with Sunpower as theirs was a considerably better deal here in Phoenix. However, it may have been too good a deal as they apparently got swamped and couldn't handle the volume. My project took over seven months from lease signing to completion of installation. Amazingly, it only took another ten days or so for city and utility inspection and approval. BTW, I thought optimum orientation of solar panels was to the south.

[sbelgrave]

Yeah, i might be wrong on the optimum direction thing. I thought i remembered South-West but i'll have to go check if i picked that up from any of the literature I had had. Phoenix huh ? I bet you get a crapload of sun out there jealous!

[Ian S]

Yeah, i might be wrong on the optimum direction thing. I thought i remembered South-West but i'll have to go check if i picked that up from any of the literature I had had. Phoenix huh ? I bet you get a crapload of sun out there jealous!

Heh-heh, yeah. In the two weeks our system has been up and running, there has only been an hour or so when production was off due to some high cloud passing by. Such will also be the case probably for the next month until we start to see some moisture in July. However, I am seeing the effects of ambient temperature on output - we tied a record 109F yesterday and are set to break the record with around 112F today. All without a cloud in the sky as humidity is forecast at 6%. Over the past two weeks, we have seen daytime highs vary from 80F to today's 112F so I'm going to plot output vs temperature and compare with the stated T coefficient for these panels.

[Naptown]

Thanks for your interesting account. I also got prepaid lease quotes from SolarCity and Sungevity and ultimately went with Sunpower as theirs was a considerably better deal here in Phoenix. However, it may have been too good a deal as they apparently got swamped and couldn't handle the volume. My project took over seven months from lease signing to completion of installation. Amazingly, it only took another ten days or so for city and utility inspection and approval. BTW, I thought optimum orientation of solar panels was to the south.

Depending on where he lives slightly southwest can be better as we can get a fair bit of morning cloudiness and sometimes fog here.

[inetdog]

Hi everyone,

We recently just completed the process of going Solar (I live in Maryland) so far it's been great. I created a sorta of blog/page with screenshots of our contracts/quotes/power generation statistic to try and record the whole experience. When we were originally considering going Solar I know the most helpful places to me were forums like these along some people that had written down how their experiences with the process. I thought i'd do the same and try to give back to the community a bit. So here goes.

https://plus.google.com/b/100515945614428541074/100515945614428541074/posts

Hopefully someone will find it useful.


Thanks,

Scott

Very helpful, thanks! (And shouldn't the top post be labelled May 2012??)