Truths About Solar

One of the misconceptions of solar, at least in Texas, is that its free or that you will save money. In Texas, there are only three reasons to do solar.

1) You have plenty of money and want to go green to help the environment Which is awesome and go right ahead.

2) To be energy resilient. Where we live, we get very brief power outages of one to two seconds several times a month. Solar will help with that. Also, we probably take one or two outages that last a few hours, twice a year. Solar can help with that also. If either outage happens when there isn't enough solar production happening, batteries are required.

3) There is no power near your property and it would be a significant cost to get power lines brought to your property. Solar is an exceptional value for this use case.

Outside these reasons, there isn't really another use case unless your a business. Unlike most states that offer tax credits or incentives, we dont have this. All we get is a Federal tax credit. Some utilities offer some type of incentive but you need to be careful.

Also, when you go thru many solar companies, they will offer a lease. In our opinion this is a bad idea for a few reasons:

1) You dont own the system. Thus you wont get the 30% tax credit. Either the solar company or the leasing company will.

2) You will get a much lower return on your investment if you lease vs get a loan. (Go thru a credit union for the best rates).

3) When you sell your house, and you still have x number of years to pay your lease, at closing you will be required to pay that off. Think about it. The buyer has no reason to buy it. Its not like you can take the system with you unless you want to replace the roof due to the number of holes.

One final point about leasing solar, when the lease is over, how much will you hae to pay to finally own the system?

When it comes to solar, companies like to talk about how much a solar system can deliver. But understand, just because you get a 15kw system, doesnt mean you will have 15kw of power available. We see many installers shorting customers by installing an inverter that isnt capable of delivering the rated PV that could be generated. Panels are relatively cheap so yes they installed 30 400w panels, which is 12,000 watts, but the inverter that was installed was a 9.6kw inverter. So your not able to use a fair amount of electricity.

Something else we see is that companies will also undersize inverters where it won't handle the full load. We are meeting with a customer (at the time of this being written) next week. He has two 12kw inverters and with the cold in TX we are having right now, his heat pump emergecy heat is whats needed to provide heat. (Most heat pumps will not make heat with the temperature is around 35 degrees or colder. The only way for them to make heat is to use emergency heat. This requires 3x more electricity as running your AC in August.) As a result when emergency heat kicks on, this draws a lot more amps. To handle that a third inverter should have been added during the initial install or move up to a pair of 15kw inverters.

This is going to cost about $8500 to add a third inverter. and the big issue is that they now have to micromanage their power so theri inverters dont reset and / or breakers trip. All this when its below freezing for four days straight. Last thing you want to deal with.

Something else some installers like to gloss over. You can get a 15KW system, but when there isnt solar production (at night or when its very cloudy) and the grid is down, how much power can your battery setup deliver? If you have a stack of five 48v100ah batteries, thats just over 25KW of storage. With each battery capable of delivering 50amps. So you think wow thats great, 250amps. Nope.

Thats 250amps of DC power not AC. Also it comes down to how much can the inverter handle. A Sol-Ark 15k inverter can deliver 50amps of 240v when there is no grid or solar production. To get more, you need to add a second inverter, which would deliver an additional 50 amps so you would have 100 amps of 240v.

This is a big deal as it depends on what your looking for when the power goes out.