Solar Panels For Home - 1 Year Later

Well, the time has finally come. Some of you have been asking for an upgrade to my

solar

panel system, and I finally passed the one

year

mark. It was actually early October so I was a bit late, but better late than never. Let's take a look at how much power my system has produced, how much I've saved, and whether it met the estimate my

solar

installer predicted. I'm Matt Ferrell. Welcome to Undecided. So if you haven't seen my previous videos on my solar installation, I'll include links in the description. But to give a quick recap, I live in the Boston area and have been documenting what it's been like to live with a 9.49 kW solar panel system in a colder climate.

My house has some challenges. If you live in the northern hemisphere, it's best to have a south facing roof to maximize your solar output, but my house faces more east to west. This is why I have

panels

on both sides of my roof. The second problem is that my ceiling is relatively small. And finally, I have a fair amount of trees on the west side of my house that start to block the sun in the mid-afternoon. Even with all of those challenges, the most efficient

panels

available today can still provide me with a significant portion of the energy I use throughout the

year

.

Before we jump into some of the year-end results, one big factor that comes up a lot in my solar panel videos is the high energy usage that some of you see in my numbers. I use a lot of energy, but it's in line with the national average. Getting solar panels helps address the power generation side of the equation, but the other half is reducing the amount of power you use. I just posted a video on that topic last week, so be sure to check it out if you're interested in seeing some of the things I've been doing to address it.

So we turned on our solar panels on October 4, 2018. All the numbers and data that I'm going to share are between then and October 3, 2019. Over the course of the year we had two short periods where our system went off. it went down due to a faulty kill switch: once in January and the other time in April. In total, we lost 8 days of production, so it's not bad. Since the switch was replaced the system has been rock solid. Production quantity throughout the year developed exactly as we expected. A sine wave looking pattern emerges, with the lowest production in the dead of winter in December, and the highest production in July during the summer.

What I found most interesting was that we saw a fairly rapid increase in production in March and a rather dramatic drop in October. It wasn't as gradual as I expected. , so I can keep a close eye on our energy use as well as our solar production. We average around 875 kWh each month, so if you overlay our usage line on top of our production line, you can see that we're not meeting all of our needs. This was known from the beginning. Our goal was to offset as much energy as we could with our solar production…given the specific challenges of our

home

.

And in that sense, we were successful with about a 54% reduction in electricity usage from our grid. Our solar installer offered a 10-year production guarantee with annual estimates. If our production falls short of 95% of those estimates, they will pay the difference. In total, we've seen 6,688 kWh produced in the first year, which is just above their 95% estimate or 6,615 kWh. In fact, we hit 96.4% best case, which is higher than I expected. In fact, in my 9-month update, I thought we'd fall a bit short of the installer's estimate, so I'm glad I was wrong with that prediction. For the days we lost due to the technical issue, I averaged the 4 days before and 4 days after each outage to try to estimate what we might have seen during those days.

In January, we averaged 5.3 kWh/day, so we probably missed out on 21.2 kWh. And in April, we averaged 19.3 kWh/day, so we missed out on 77.2 kWh. As disappointing as it is, we probably lost about $25 of electricity during that period. If I add the missing watts back into the grand total, we probably should have seen something like 6,786 kWh for the year, or about 97.8% best-case. I've said this before, but my goal has been to reduce my dependency on the grid as much as I can, and to do it in a financially responsible way that works for us. So where did we land financially last year?

Well, my wife and I are quite happy. We used to average $212 a month for our electric bill and now we average $97.80 a month…and that's with the addition of an EV to the mix, too. If you look at this graph showing the year before solar compared to the year on solar, you can see exactly how much our electricity bills have changed. Obviously, it follows the same sine wave trend as solar production, so there's a big dip in our bill around June and July. You can see that in June we had a negative balance on our electric bill.

I am not exaggerating when I say that my wife stood in the living room laughing out loud when she showed me the bill. Year after year, we save $1,489.86. Right in line with the $1,500 estimate I was projecting in my last video update. In Massachusetts we have full net metering, which means that any overproduction we put on the grid is completely removed from our kWh used. In essence, the network acts like a battery for us in terms of production and costs. That might not be the case where you live. So how does all of this work out with the cost of the system as a whole?

I've gone into great detail about this in previous videos, so I won't recap all the details here, but it worked as we hoped. Our system cost a total of $29,609, which has 25-year warranties on the panels and microinverters, as well as a 10-year warranty on installer labor and production. The federal solar tax credit allowed us to recover $8,883 of the cost. And not to go off on a tangent, but I get a lot of comments about my “neighbors paying for my solar panels”…that's not how tax credits work. It's a credit on your tax burden for the year you claim it, and it's not that different from being able to claim your children as dependents to increase your tax deductions.

The money you receive comes in the form of a tax refund because you overpaid taxes that year. Depending on your situation, you are not guaranteed to get the full 30% in cash. In either case, our final cost comes to $20,726, which we have on a 10-year solar loan. We've been working to pay it off as quickly as possible, and in fact, we've already cut it in half, so our interest on the loan should be pretty low when it's all said and done. In addition to a recent large lump sum we sent, we have been paying $200/month on the loan.

We also receive SREC for the amount of solar energy we produce, which amounts to $126.22 per month for a total of 10 years. In case you don't know what SRECs are, they are paid by the power companies. Power companies must achieve a certain amount of renewable energy on their grid system, so SRECs are an incentive to increase the number of people contributing to that renewable goal. Not all states have a SREC market and the value varies from region to region. When we average our monthly savings on the electric bill, we are saving $114.20 per month. Add up the SREC and the savings on electric bills and you get $240.42, which means we're earning $40.42 every month right now. (Yes, my wife plans to retire early with these savings.) I know the naysayers of solar power may point to it as proof that this wasn't worth it, but if you look at the long term those numbers change quite a bit.

It's only $40 right now because we're still paying off our loan at $200 a month. But at the rate that we're paying this off, we expect the loan to run out in a couple of years. Savings of $1,500 per year on your electric bill will translate to $15,000 in savings in the first 10 years alone. And that's assuming electricity prices don't rise, which they will. They have increased by 15% in the last 10 years, which equates to about $0.02 per kWh per year. But that varies depending on the region. Even without SREC, we would break even in solar panels in 13 or 14 years. But with SRECs we're looking at a much shorter payback period than that.

SRECs and electric bill savings over 10 years are $30,146, which is a break-even point in just under 7 years. However, we have to deal with the interest on the solar loan. But as I mentioned before, we're paying it off much faster than the 10-year loan, so the total interest should be a couple thousand dollars. We're on track to break even in just over 8 years at this point, which is right in the ballpark of what we expected before installing the panels. And this is on a system with a 25-year warranty, which should be able to last much longer. Yes, there may be maintenance costs here and there in the future.

And yes, if I have to replace my roof, it can cost a few thousand dollars to have a solar installer remove and replace the panels for me. But just looking at the total electricity savings from years 10-25, once the SRECs are gone, we're still talking about $20,000 - $25,000 in electricity savings...if not more. Everything from year 9 on should be pure profit for us, so having to spend a little money here or there to maintain or replace our roof is a drop in the ocean overall. And this is without counting the positive impact that solar panels have on the value of your

home

.

If you finance and pay for the system yourself and don't rent it, adding solar to your home actually increases your home's value by 3-4%. You will often see about $4 per watt of installed solar panel system add to the value of your home. While I don't count on that for my system, it's nice to know that I should see a significant increase in my home's value in addition to the electricity savings. I've said it in previous videos, but my goal was to get as much energy as possible from a sustainable, renewable resource, and to do it in a financial way that worked for us.

And in that goal we have been successful so far. At this time, there is only a small saving on a month-to-month basis, but as soon as the panels break even, the system becomes a profit maker every month going forward. It also doesn't hurt that my car is mostly charged with sunlight. If you're interested in going solar, I recommend checking out Energysage for research and articles. It is a completely free service that has great articles and reviews on different solar panels, inverters, and solar technology that can be helpful no matter where you live. But if you live in the US and are interested in solar, you can get quotes from installers through my Energysage portal.

You can enter your information and request quotes from solar installers, which are routed to your EnergySage account. You don't have to worry about being flooded with phone calls. It makes it easy to compare installers, cost estimates, and energy production quotes in one place. And the installers also have customer ratings and reviews, so you can find a good quality and reliable installer. I've used it myself, this is how I found my installer, so I can attest to how well it helped me through the process. I will continue to do these solar panel upgrades as things progress. You might get a Tesla Powerwall at some point, so I'll absolutely cover that when it happens.

Let me know if you have questions you'd like to see me cover. And I would love to know what your experience with solar energy has been. Jump into the comments and let me know. I hope you found this video useful. If you did make sure to like and share it with your friends because it really helps the channel. There are also other ways you can support the channel. Check out my SFSF store for some great Tesla, Space X, science, and Undecided shirts. There are also other links in the description for great gear and discounts. And as always, many thanks to all my Patreon followers.

Your support is really helping make these videos possible. Be sure to check out my Patreon page for additional details on how to join the crew. And if you haven't already, consider subscribing and hitting the notification bell to get alerts when I post a new video. And as always, thanks so much for watching, see you in the next one.