Tag Archives: inverters

Whole Home Battery Backup System – Sol-Ark/Storz Power Outage Demo

Energy Storage, Solar Equipment, , , , , , , ,
Hey I’m Adam with the Solar Truth here and I’m with Andy out in Temecula California, and we did a really cool uh battery backup system, not totally off-grid. You know it is grid tied, but it could go off-grid.

You know we got battery solar, SolArK inverters and a 10.5 kilowatt LG solar panel system um. You know so uh so Andy. If you want to uh just talk about why we, what your goal was here and and what we were trying to accomplish with your house yeah thanks Adam well, when I was looking for a solar system, I was really looking for a system that could take our House to be the on the critical circuit, so the whole house could be powered and um looking around at different systems and different companies.

I really couldn’t find a solution until I came to SunPro and I’m not being paid for this, but uh it’s for real. These guys know what they’re doing they do. Customized designs and you’ll see from the installation that uh it delivered exactly what they promised they would.

So it’s really great yeah and I know Andy’s uh, one of his big concerns was was off-grid. You know we’re out here. We’re actually just outside the fire zone, so we didn’t get like the really big battery rebate that is available in California for a little bit longer um.

But we got a pretty good uh uh size rebate, it’s about 6500 bucks yeah, just over 69 um, so which is the standard rebate but locked in at a tier that that kind of went away and it’s dwindling down um.

But we were able to reserve that a while ago and get that locked in what the concern was was a lot of production when we’re off grid, especially when uh in the winter like when the sun’s not out as much.

So. That’S why these these panels are actually at uh more tilted a little bit more than normal, so they’re at about they’re right about 30 degree angle at perfectly true magnetic south, and the reason for that is in the summer, with a little bit flatter array like 15 To 20 percent you’re getting more production because there’s more hours in the in the summer, the sun’s out longer, but in the winter you’re, not nearly as getting as much production when you don’t have as much sun.

So then you need more production to charge your batteries to get, you know that production too. So anyway, you get a little bit more uh winter production with this system and a little bit less summer production because of that, but overall the production isn’t much less cumulatively.

Um, so it’s you know going to provide more uh when you need it basically to get you through those winter nights and stuff, and then we did a pretty cool battery backup system here too, that we’ll show you in a second and you know able to provide um, you know pretty much all the power for his home here, so we got two solar, 12 kilowatt inverters here.

These are very popular with prepper scenarios. So in fact, a lot of people actually replace other battery systems like even Tesla powerwalls, for example, when they can’t provide enough power for backup cases.

So, there’s actually quite a few advantages with these, when you have off-grid one is, you can do dc connection to your solar. So if your battery totally drains a lot of battery systems, can’t even restart you have to like manually start them or charge the batteries, it can create a lot of problems, but with dc power.

As soon as that sun hits those panels, the batteries are charging and the system’s on. They also can do load shedding and reduce demand charges automatically like with commercial scenarios too so they’re just very universal and have they can auto start generators, there’s just a lot of capacity with these.

So if you know like here, we can add an auto start generator if you want now, you know if that ends up being needed, so we have uh. You know 12 kilowatts. What that does is one it can have a lot of solar connected to it.

You can have 12 to 16 kilowatts of solar actually connected to it, each one and then um they can do 50 amps of power each. So that means we got 100 amps of backup power, which you would need five Tesla Powerwalls to do that.

So we have one of those arrays out there connected to this one and then two of them connected to this one and then we’re charging our stores. Batteries that we have over here I’ll show those in a second and um yeah.

We’Ll do a live test also to shut the power off and and uh I’ll be out here, shutting it off and then we’ll video inside as it’s being shut off, and you know using you know whatever we want in the house, um with uh uh.

Basically, the power being awful okay, so we have a stores battery system here, uh. These have a lot of advantages versus a lot of batteries on the market. One is their lithium ion phosphate, which can’t catch fire explode.

It’s non-toxic lithium-ion technology, batteries like cell phones and cars, are lightweight, but they have those disadvantages to them. You know you shouldn’t put it on like a bedroom wall, for example, so these actually have 8000 life cycles, which will generally give you about 15 to 20 years of operating time.

Most battery systems are about 4000 life cycles and it’s a 15 year production warranty, uh they’re 5.12 kilowatt hours each. So the whole system is about 20.5 kilowatt hours, which will give you like one to two days run time uh when the when, when it’s raining and your solar is not working uh, it really depends on how many loads you have going and what you’re using off-grid Uh and when the power goes out, they’re also stackable up to 14 batteries.

So you could do a pretty large system you could add on later, so we can check out the inverter system now and show you the monitoring and and what you can all see from the system as it’s functioning. So the solar inverters, unlike a lot of other inverters out there, actually have a display screen on them and a mobile app.

So you can look at it. However, you want, you know you can come out here if uh something’s wrong with your phone and uh just tap on the screen there. Right now we have uh power comes from the solar, we have energy going to the grid.

We have energy going to the house and we have the battery state of charge so um on this one. We’Ve already had uh 48 kilowatt hours today and about half that, on the other one, with with a third of the arrays and uh, the battery is at 98 charge right now.

We have, you, know power going to the grid and to the home. So on your app um, you have uh everything you can see here too, and you can actually, you know, choose what you can see um and look at your production, the battery state of charge, uh the energy same.

You know same thing on there, except a little clearer and kind of all the options you want. Then you can adjust your settings on the inverters as well. Here. Our main panel here is actually a 400 amp panel um.

Our main disconnect is here, and then our solar inverters and the house is actually on this panel over here. So what I’m gonna do for this test is shut off our main panel and then we’re powering the backup panel and the solar and we’ll do a live feed into the house running stuff and show how that’s gonna work.

Okay, so we’re doing a live test. Now I’m gonna go ahead and shut off the main power to the house and we’re gonna run some equipment in the house. Here we go three two one all right: simulating uh, off-grid power shut off all right, everything’s still running.

There was just a slight little flicker and we’re boiling water right now on an induction cooktop and it’s on a boost setting the next thing we’re going to try is run the microwave. At the same time. Here we go we’re heating, a cup of water, with a microwave running at full blast, we’re boiling the water.

Now I’m going to turn on the oven. Okay, the oven is preheating and all our lights. Halogen lights are on indoors and not a hiccup everything’s running and now yeah over here we have, our solar inverter has uh, it shows the grids off, yellow and now all the power is coming from our solar system, as you can see there and the batteries as You can see here on both inverters, so that’s what our app will be, showing now too, that um the batteries are starting to discharge and uh there.

We got all our information there too, on the solar battery and everything pretty cool, all right cool. We have water boiling and the water’s boiling in here. You may recognize this because we were trying to do a different battery system before called Paladin, and it sounded amazing.

It kind of sounded too good to be true to be honest and uh that that’s what I believe it was kind of too good to be true, so you got to be really careful. You know SolArk has been around for a long time, so we ended up uh just having a lot of delays not able to get the battery.

We got the the container, and that was it just the cabinet. The batteries going, no inverters, no batteries or anything and uh. You know I didn’t want to. I didn’t trust that uh, that it was gonna happen.

So I ended up switching to SolArk, which just has a lot of advantages that are uh, reliable and they’ve been around for a long time. I think, like at least like 10 years and um uh they’re they’re, probably the most common battery in a proper situation.

They’Ve won awards for being the best thought out: uh off-grid battery system and uh generator uh available battery, so uh. This is a great way to go and it’s got a great monitoring system, just everything’s dialed in so it ends up being just an amazing solution.

If you need a lot of power off-grid all right, thanks for watching our video on Sol-ark, live test demonstration with our off-grid or grid tie, but can go off-grid battery backup system uh. That test we did was actually the first test we had done here and uh.

It was live and um, you know no edits and we just filmed it as it was and worked great worked perfectly so um that was pretty awesome and um. Uh yeah make sure you like and subscribe to the videos I’m gonna try to do a lot more of these videos of like pretty cool off-grid systems.

We’ve been doing a lot. I’ve been helping a lot of battery backup systems, mainly because of the fire rebate out in California, because it’s just such a good rebate. That’s uh, amazing and uh, sadly not going to be available for very much longer because it looks like they’re, not funding it.

Uh more so join us next time and thanks for watching

Source : Youtube

The Rise of Sol-Ark: Becoming the Leading ESS Company

Solar Equipment, ,
What makes the sol-ark different in the solar industry is our inverter technology. We are a hybrid all-in-one inverter, we are a transformerless inverter. We are battery agnostic, so you can actually use the sol-ark with any battery out there and we work well with existing systems.

So if a customer has a grid-tied system and they want to retrofit it to an off-grid system battery backup, we can do that. The primary thing that I see that sol-ark does different than other companies in the solar industry is the support I hear from customers and Installers all the time that, because we do try to answer the phone as fast as we can answer emails as fast as we can and having seven-day support so that, if someone’s got a system that is down, we try to get that system up and running for them as fast as we possibly can hands down. I think EnergySage is a testament to how pleased our customers are with us and we will always support them, whether it is the installer, the end-user or DIY-er.

So our core values are know. You bring the energy, stay grounded, reach your potential radical support, family power and all-in. So the thing that puts sol-ark ahead of every other company is just the work atmosphere, the work culture as well as the customer support and our dedication and attention to detail to what we do.

I see sol-ark going pretty much uh, probably dominating the uh, the inverter industry. It seems like what we’ve got does everything that the customers needed to do with the being able to parallel stack them to make a bigger system? At the same time, we’ve got the smaller systems that are available.

I’Ve been here for almost a year and I’ve seen the company doubling in size. I really see us kind of taking over the inverter industry.

Source : Youtube

Three Batteries That Are BETTER Than The Tesla Powerwall

Energy Storage, Solar Equipment, , , , ,
Welcome to the Solar Energy Channel, where you’ll get an honest inside look at all things solar. In this video, we’re gonna talk about three great alternatives to the Tesla Powerwall. I’m Warren and I’m Larry.

And don’t forget to like, and subscribe so that you’ll receive notifications for future videos, just like this. You know Larry, everybody’s heard of the Tesla Powerwall. It’s a popular product, people associated with Tesla and the company and the brand, but there are great alternatives to the Powerwall that are out there.

Yes, and there’s three in particular that we offer. One is the SolarEdge Energy Hub with an LG Chem battery. Another one is, is the SMA battery inverter with an LG Chem battery. And then a third option is the Enphase Encharge system.

Great, let’s dive into that first option, the LG Chem battery with the SolarEdge storage option. How is that better than a Powerwall? – Yeah so one of the really neat things about the SolarEdge Energy Hub system with the LG Chem battery is that you can add up to three inverters to one backup system, and each inverter can have up to two batteries.

So you can end up with a lot of storage, not only that, but you can also integrate an EV charger as well, which is another neat feature with the energy hub. So now let’s talk about Larry, SMA with the same LG Chem battery and how that compares to a Tesla Powerwall.

Yeah, so SMA is a AC coupled system, which means that you can add it onto an existing system. That’s the great part about the SMA inverter setup. It’s a great add on solution, which is really their strength.

They don’t have the option to integrate with the EV charger, but it’s a great add on solution. – Great, so you could decide to do that at any time. You can put in solar now and add on an SMA battery with the LG Chem a year from now or six months from now.

Correct, yup. – And then finally, let’s talk about the Enphase system. – Enphase also has a great system and it’s similar and set up to the SolarEdge Energy Hub, in that you can add multiple batteries.

You can set it up to backup your whole house. If you’d like to do that. Enphase can be a little bit more expensive, than SolarEdge Energy Hub, but another great technology. Great, and overall, the SolarEdge with the SMA with the LG Chem batteries or the Enphase, how do they compare price-wise to the Powerwall? Yeah, great questions.

So they’re all gonna be a little bit more expensive than the Powerwall overall, but they’re also more robust and have additional features that you can build out to your system. Great. – So in summary, the Tesla Powerwall is a great brand.

It’s a great product, but there’s three alternatives that we think are just as good or better to the Tesla Powerwall. That’s the SolarEdge Energy Hub Inverter with an LG Chem battery, an SMA battery inverter with that same LG Chem battery, or the Enphase Encharge system.

And the nice thing about the SMA battery inverter is that you can install it either during your solar installation or at any time after. So if you have an existing system, and you’re thinking about adding on batteries, that may be a great solution for you.

Thanks for watching, if you enjoyed this content, don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel for future releases.

Source : Youtube

Vestwoods Power: Tesla Powerwall KILLER?

Energy Storage, Solar Energy, Solar Equipment, , , , , , ,
I have reviewed some power stations in the past few months, but the VESTWOODS Power I’m going to present today seems to have unique highlights that make it different from the rest. And today they invited me to their lab to check out everything.

So, what’s special about it? Let’s take a closer look! Starting with the unboxing. We have a bag of accessories that you need to get this power station to work and the main VESTWOODS Power unit. Definitely included for the official unit will be some paperwork like a manual or warranty card.

Moving on to the design, here are all the ports on the machine. We have two communication ports, an ON/OFF switch, and two sets of positive and negative ports. Moving down are the indicators. Turning to the back, we have the bracket so you can mount the machine to your wall if needed.

While today in the lab, we are not going to mount it on a wall. We’ll just put it on the floor to test. But before the test, let me walk you through the key specs first. The one we were testing was the VE51100W model with a 5.12KWh capacity, they have a larger version boasting a capacity of 14.33 kWh. The cost that comes with such an enormous capacity of course is the weight. The weight of the two is 54kg and 128.5kg respectively, this is definitely not something you can easily move around.

But we can see the logic here, they are designed to let you mount on a wall or put in a corner instead of moving it around. It has more than 6000 cycles and was designed to use for more than 15 years.

For others, you can check out on the screen. To use the VESTWOODS Power, you have to connect it to a solar inverter, VESTWOODS also sells that as well. We use the cables that come with the box to connect the positive, negative port, and the Communication cable with the solar inverter, and then press the ON/OFF switch to turn it on.

As we can see, the indicator will light up as well. Now moving to the max loading power test. Of course, the max loading power relates to the solar inverter as well. I’m just so glad that it handles those high-power electrical appliances without a hiccup.

The next test is the charging and discharging speed. We used the RePower, a professional battery test machine to test that, as you can see it reached almost 100amp for charging, which means, theoretically, you could fully charge this 5.12KWh capacity in just one hour because the VESTWOODS battery backup we were testing came with 51.2 nominal voltage. That’s fast compared to some of the big players on the market. And here is the discharging.

Just like you would expect, the VESTWOODS Power offers an App. Here on the home page, you can clearly see the status of it. How much power you get from the solar panel or the grid and the remaining capacity and consumption of the battery.

You can check your production power and consumption each day. You can view more from the Statistics, so you will know your total production, total grid Feed-in, etc. Also, you can check more data about your Inverter.

Alright, that’s a very simple and first look at the VESTWOODS Power. Compared to the “Portable” Power Stations I’ve reviewed before, the advantages are obvious, it offers a massive capacity that lasts for days that other normal ones couldn’t even imagine.

It integrates with your family grid power system seamlessly even when power outages occur, your power still stays on. And it stores solar energy. This is great as you probably live in an area with time-of-use charges, like the sample plan in California, 33 cents from 8 am to 4 pm and then 53 cents from 4 pm to 9 pm, that’s a much higher rate.

All solar generation happens during the day so if you are not home and you are not consuming that power you could store it in your battery and use it when the peak charges are present. But like all such battery backups, they are not cheap, definitely more expensive than let’s say, a whole home generator.

Usually, the price lies between $15,000 to $20,000 for a 10 – 15 kWh backup. Gladly, if we compared to other big brands, VESTWOODS still has the best price per Wh. Thus reliability and safety are the two most important factors when buying such battery backups.

The VESTWOODS adopts a new Lithium Iron Phosphate battery technology, which has a higher resistance to thermal runaway, and doesn’t set on fire or explode under pressure so they are safe and reliable, with 6,000 cycles and 10 years of warranty, that could definitely earn back all you invest for such a product.

So if you experience power outages often for an extended period of time and you want to be able to stay warm or cold, or for those areas with extreme weather events that are without power for weeks that could lead to severe damage, then this VESTWOODS is more of a convenience reason to buy and sometimes even a necessity, what do you think?

Source : Youtube

What is Solar Inverter Clipping?

Solar Energy, Solar Equipment, ,
Welcome to the Solar Energy Channel, where you’ll get an honest inside look at all things solar. In this video, we’re gonna talk about solar inverter clipping.  I’m Warren. – And I’m Larry, and don’t forget to like, and subscribe so that you’ll receive notifications for future videos, just like this.

So, Larry, what exactly is inverter clipping? – So inverter clipping, Warren, happens when your solar modules are producing more DC power than what your inverter can actually harvest. – And when would you choose to start clipping? – Yeah, so there’s a couple of situations where you might design so that your inverter clips more often.

One would be, if you have a limitation like a transformer size or maybe utility size limitation, where you’ll build the inverter to match that size, and then you’ll have a much larger DC system size. So even though you’re clipping during the highest production times of the day, during those shorter times, you’re still producing the full amount of what that inverter can actually produce.

So that begs the question, Larry, should I rather have more solar panels or more inverters? – That’s the real question, Warren. And that’s something that we look at on a case by case basis. We look at all the variables for your system and determine how big the inverter should be versus the solar module size so that we can build that system to produce as many kilowatt hours per system costs as, as humanly possible.

So in summary, your design team may choose to use inverters that will require some clipping to in order to either save you money or to meet the requirements of the utility company, their transformer sizes, et cetera.

Thanks for watching, if you enjoyed this content, don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel for future releases.

Source : Youtube

Are Solar Panels For Your Home Still Worth It?

Clean Energy, Solar Energy, Solar Equipment, , , , ,

It’s been almost 4 years since I had solar panels installed on my house, which is located in  Massachusetts. In general they’ve been performing  pretty close to what was promised, but last  year threw us some curveballs that made me a  little concerned.

I saw a pretty sharp decline  in the amount of solar produced. Since my solar panels are nearing their 4 year anniversary, I  thought it would be a good idea to share what   I’ve learned living with solar panels in an  area you might not think they’d be good for,   as well as what happened last year.

Do I still  think getting solar panels was a good idea?   Let’s see if we can come to a decision on this. I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided. If you haven’t seen my previous videos on my  solar panel installation, I’ll include links in   the description so you can check them out.

I won’t  rehash everything from those videos, but in short,   I live in the Boston area and have been  documenting what it’s been like living with   a 9.49 kW solar panel system in a colder climate.

My wife and I decided to get solar installed for   two reasons: 1) reduce our electric bill and  save money over time, and 2) get as much of our electricity from clean sources as possible.  There’s no question where my electricity is coming from when it’s being produced on my roof.

You could probably also include a third reason to the mix, my Tesla Model 3. Charging up your  EV with electricity that you generate yourself is pretty cool. I guess you could say the  idea of energy independence is enticing.

My house has a few challenges. If  you live in the northern hemisphere,   it’s best to have a southern facing  roof to maximize your solar production,   but my house is oriented more east-to-west.

That’s why I have panels on both sides of my roof,   so I can capture morning and afternoon sun. The  second issue is that my roof is pretty small. And   finally, I have a fair amount of trees on the  western side of my house that start to block   the sun in the mid-to-late afternoon.

Like I  said, my house is a bit challenging for solar. For the past few years my solar panels have  reduced our reliance on the grid by about 54%,   which is what we expected given my home’s issues.

We’re still on track for the system to have paid for itself in  savings by 2026 (it’s a 7-8 year payback),   but there’s some wrinkles to  that I’ll get to in a bit. First though, I’ve got to get into last year’s  issues.

We saw a pretty steep drop in performance   in 2021, but it’s really important to give these  numbers some context. If you don’t have solar,   it’s easy to armchair quarterback and  ridicule solar as a waste of money.

Some of the comments I see most often on my  solar panel videos bring up the misperception   that solar panels degrade and die quickly. Others  question the accuracy of solar installers telling  you how much you’ll produce each year … sometimes  for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Weather is going to be a huge factor in how well your solar panels  work. The criticism is usually, if a meteorologist struggles to predict the weather a week out,  how can you predict years of solar production.

On that first point about degradation, it’s  absolutely true that you’ll see a decline   year over year. However, if you have quality made panels from the major manufacturers,   those panels will last 30+ years.

For these  panels you’ll have warranties that guarantee  minimal losses over the next 20 years, but that’s  not end of life … that’s just the warranty period.   In my case I have LG solar panels on my home  that are guaranteed to produce at least 88.

4%   of their original efficiency, which means  you’re talking about a .5% drop each year.   And that’s why I had to raise an  eyebrow at last year’s numbers. My solar installer offered a 10 year production  guarantee.

If my panels produce less than 95% of   their projection, they’ll pay the difference  in the cost of electricity. They projected   that we’d be producing close to 6,600  kWh each year for the first few years,   but last year we produced only 6,479 kWh.

The year before we produced 7,293 kWh.   So comparing 2021 to 2020, we saw an 11% drop in  production. So yeah … I was a little perplexed,   frustrated, with a dash of concern. To add to that  our electricity use had increased slightly because   my wife started working from home due to the  pandemic, and our electricity prices had risen … a   lot.

Back when we got the solar panels installed  we were paying about $0.24/kWh. Now we’re paying   about $0.30/kWh. On average we use roughly  950 kWh per month over the course of a year,   so you’re talking about going from a potential  bill of $228 a few years ago to $285 today.

That’s when the data nerd in me kicked into gear   and I started crunching the numbers  to figure out what was going on. But before getting to what I found,  there’s some other numbers worth crunching.

I’ve been asked on previous solar panel videos how  much my home insurance went up with solar panels,   and that really depends on your provider. My home  insurance didn’t change at all with solar, but   we’re planning on moving at some point soon, so  we’ve been looking to see if there are some better   deals for our home and auto insurance.

And that’s  where today’s sponsor, Policygenius, comes in. Policygenius makes it crazy easy to find and  compare insurance coverage that’s just right for   you. They don’t sell your personal info to third  parties, they have thousands of five-star reviews   on Google and Trustpilot, and they’ve helped over  30 million people shop for insurance since 2014.

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Policygenius has   saved customers an average of $1,250 per year over  what they were paying for home & auto insurance. Head over to policygenius.com/undecided to  get your free home & auto insurance quotes   and see how much you could save.

Thanks  to Policygenius and to all of you for   supporting the channel. Now back to what I found  after digging into my solar production data. When looking at your solar panel production,  it’s important to not focus and obsess   on the day-to-day numbers.

There’s going  to be an incredible amount of volatility   day to day depending on the weather.  Cloudy days, rain, snow, etc.   It all depends, so you have to look longer  term when assessing how it’s performing and if   it’s worth the cost of the system.

It’s the same  reason my solar installer does a yearly guarantee. Take a look at my monthly numbers year over  year and you’ll start to spot some clear trends.   Summer is obviously going to be peak production  because of the increased daylight hours   and the sun being at a higher angle in the sky.

During winter you have shorter days and a lower   angle of sun. The yearly trend looks a lot  like a daily trend. Very low production   in the winter and none at night, and a swell  during the summer months or middle of the day.

However, something should jump out at you  on this chart. The 2021 numbers between   May and September are dramatically  lower than the years before it. I knew weather was going to play a role in how  effective my panels would perform, but I didn’t   expect such a huge swing to happen year over  year.

That’s when I pulled up the historical   weather data for my area. If you overlay the  amount of precipitation on top of the solar   production chart, the correlation is pretty clear.  Here in the New England area, 2021 was one of the   warmest and wettest on record, especially if you  look at the July, August, and September data.

2021 was the third warmest on record going all  the way back to 1895. It was also the third   wettest year on record and July 2021 coming in  as the wettest month on record. Massachusetts   typically sees about 4 inches of rain in July,  but last year we saw an average of 10.

3 inches. So the mystery was solved for  why 2021’s production was so   low. It wasn’t anything wrong with my  panels, inverters, or other hardware.   Thankfully, if you look at what we’ve seen so far  in 2022, everything is back to normal.

In fact,   April’s production numbers were the best  we’ve seen so far after four years of data.   While you might think this challenged my belief  in only vetting solar production numbers year   to year vs. day to day, and that weather doesn’t  really factor in too much long term, it hasn’t.   2021’s yearly number came in at 6,479.6 kWh with  a prediction from my installer of 6,549 kWh.   That prediction was off by about 1%, which  really isn’t bad at all.

The variability in seasonal weather conditions is factored into  historical data that solar installers pull from   to make their future production numbers. And  from what I’m seeing, it’s pretty accurate … even   though I’ve seen wild swings between a couple of  years.

2020 was about 10.8% higher than predicted.   They worked out the prediction on the  conservative side of what we might see. And that brings me to the giant question  of, “do I still think it was worth it?”   If you’ve watched my previous videos on my solar panels, you’ll know that I’ve said in each one of these that the answer is yes.

But you’ll  also know that I always stress very hard that   it’s going to depend on what your personal goals  are. Anyone that tells you that solar panels are worth it no matter what should be ignored.

And the same is true from anyone that says solar panels are a scam and will never work.  Solar panels are just one method of producing  electricity and don’t necessarily make sense for  every person in every location and situation.

For me, I live in an area without time of use  electricity rates, but we do have net metering that pays back nearly a 1 to 1 credit on my  electricity bill. So we bank some credits in   the summer that wipe out our electric bills in  those months and into the fall.

And during the   winter we’re primarily pulling from the grid like  anyone else. We also have solar renewable energy credits (SREC). We’re getting $126.22 a month  in SREC credits for 10 years, so we’ll be seeing   $15,146 from that.

That leaves us on the hook  for $12,380 out of pocket for the cost of our solar panels. But then you have to look at the  money we’re saving on our electric bill. We were   spending about $2,600 a year on electricity, but  we’ve been saving almost $1,500 a year with solar.

And since our electricity prices have risen  to $0.30/kWh, our savings has actually gone   up a little bit. All of that rolled together is how our solar panel system will pay for itself sometime in 2026, and the panels should  easily go another 20 years or more after that, so they’ll be producing free,  clean electricity at that point.

Again, I can’t say this enough, the warranty  period is not the end of life for the panel. But here’s that wrinkle I brought up earlier about  my specific return on investment. I’m not going to be living in my house in 2026.

I’m not going  to be living in this house a year from now. My wife and I are building a new, modular, net zero home this year and will hopefully be moving in   early next year. That means we’ll be selling our  current home with the solar panels before they’ve  returned on the investment, which means we’re  only about halfway into that payback period.

Am I going to lose out on that money? Am I going  to have a hard time selling my home with solar panels on it? On that first point, no, I’m not  going to be selling my solar panels at a loss.

A home’s value actually increases with  solar panels. It’s not that different   from doing a kitchen or bathroom renovation.  And solar panels are very popular in my area. Energysage has a great article that details the  impacts to a home’s value.

According to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which used  data from 8 states over an 11 year time period, you can expect to see $4 per watt of installed solar capacity added to the value of your home.

In my case, that could be a $38,000 increase. To  me that sounds too high. But according to Zillow,   they saw homes with solar panels selling for 4.1%  more. And the National Renewable Energy Laboratory   reported seeing an increase in home value by $20  for every $1 reduction in annual utility bills.

That math would work out to about $30,000 for  my house, which isn’t that far off from the   first study. The bottom line: the more money  your solar panels save you on electricity,   the more it increases your house’s value.

I won’t have to wait too much longer to   find out if that holds true, so stay tuned  to the channel if you want to hear how it went selling a house with solar, as well as a ton of videos around my upcoming house build.

So do I still think getting solar panels for my home was worth it. That’s a big yes. For my goals,   which was saving money on electricity over  time and ensuring my power was coming from a   clean energy source, it ticked all the boxes.

Our  system cost $20,727 after the Federal Tax Credit.   By the time we leave this house, we’ll have  received about $6,000 in SREC payments.   About $1,500 a year in electricity savings, so add  another $6000 on top of that.

We’ll have whittled   the payback down to about $8,000 by the time we  leave. And if the $30,000 increase in value holds true, the return on investment will have been well  worth it … but that wasn’t my only goal.

Again, I did this for some energy independence and to  ensure I was getting energy from a clean source. Would I recommend that you get solar? That’s  tricky because I don’t know your goals, where you live, or what costs are in your area, so you’re  going to need to do that evaluation for yourself.

But if you are thinking about it, don’t wait much  longer. If you live in the US, the Federal solar   tax credit is going to be dropping from 26% to  22% in 2023. Solar installers book up fast, so   you really need to be scheduling installers now to  ensure you get the panels installed before the end   of the year.

I’ve been getting quotes for my new  house and installers are already booked up through   August and into September. So start looking today  and evaluating if it’s the right choice for you. And on that note, you should check out EnergySage  for great articles and reviews of solar equipment.

I’ve found them to be an amazing resource  when researching my current installation,   as well as my next one. I also used Energysage  to find my installer on my current house. If you   live in the US, check out my Energysage portal to  find installers in your area and get quotes.

Full  transparency, this is an affiliate program, so I  do get a small commission if you use my portal.   But regardless of that, I love Energysage and find  them a great resource. My favorite part of finding   an installer through them is that you’re not  giving out your phone number to get deluged with dozens of calls.

All of the quotes are delivered  to your Energysage account and are presented in a   way that’s an easy apples-to-apples comparison  between installers. I strongly recommend it. So what do you think? Do you want solar for your  home? Jump into the comments and let me know.

If you liked this video, be sure to check out  one of these videos over here. And thanks to   all of my patrons for your continued support  and welcome to new producers Michael Maxie,   Greg MacWilliam, and J.

And thanks to all of  you for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.

Source : Youtube