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I Bought a House with Solar Panels

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Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#111

Post by apendleton »

_ea1k wrote: post #85
imgabe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it'…

Unfortunately inverters fail, including the little microinverters (or optimizers with something like solaredge) on the panels themselves. This requires a qualified person to repair and possibly roof access as well. Depending on which panel it is, they may have to temporarily remove multiple panels to get to it. If the cost of labor is on the consumer, this can wipe out months of returns in a single visit. Of course,…

This is a risk with Sunrun too, though, and the risk that it will happen is undoubtedly factored into what they charge.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#112

Post by octorian »

imgabe wrote: post #23
BeetleB wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're better off buying the system up front if possible or even financing it and claiming the tax credit yourself. Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. As for the tax credit, you do get it in the form of a discounted price. Over here, that's how all the solar companies pitch it. They'll install it for cheap, but the condition is that you pay them a big fraction of the tax credit the foll…

> Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it'…

I have a system from SolarCity that also came with my home when I bought it. This past year was finally the point where "buying it out" was possible, but I procrastinated. In retrospect, it's actually a good thing I did. My panels turned out to have a manufacturing defect, and now all need to be replaced. Because of the arrangement, SolarCity is doing it for me.

That being said, their monthly cost is fixed so it's more a philosophical issue for me. I may still just buy it outright someday, especially if I want to expand it.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#113

Post by dakna »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #5

>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…

The same reason why a lot of other industries and political parties use this playbook: It works more often than not.

It is much easier to influence a decision by catering to emotions instead of reasoning.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#114

Post by rconti »

yumraj wrote: post #73
rconti wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance? I bought solar from a company in San Jose. They guarantee production, they warrantee the installation to be leak-proof, the panels and inverter have factory warrantees. I guess they won't come over and wash my panels for me, but, no kidding.

Which company did you buy from? Which panels are they using? LG, Panasonic, Chinese? I may be in the market soon..

I went with Clean Solar in San Jose. All companies I got quotes from were very similar; I wanted to go with a small/local company, but the smallest company I talked with turned out to be shady/on the verge of criminal, and for me, Clean Solar struck the right balance of being local and big enough to have tons of great reviews and presumably good financial resources, but not huge. The SunRun guy I talked to was also great but I just didn't get the greatest feel in the end.

In my particular case, I got SunPower panels, but (like most installers), you can get whatever you want. I went back and forth and was on the verge of going with 360w LG NeON panels but then a deal came up on SunPower 345s that were substantially cheaper per watt, getting close to non-premium brands (of course with that slight wattage discount; I suspect they're older panels being phased out in favor of new 360s as the top end). I had liked the idea of using SunPower but the 360s were even more expensive than the already-premium LG 360s, and the 345s at a substantial discount were just the ticket.

Feel free to ping me if you like, I was super happy with my sales guy who was far more patient with me and spent far more time on the phone with me than I think most people would, and the install was done in one day, they arrived early and finished early, and left the place spotless. Can't say it wouldn't have been the same case with anyone else, but I was still impressed.

It's pretty cool how they do the quoting and measurements; get up on your roof and use specialized cameras to 'view' the sky from all corners, find obstructions, calculate sun angles, etc. They gave me an estimate of per-month production that's been amazingly accurate. (the guaranteed production is on a per-year basis with production declining at a certain annual %)

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#115

Post by rconti »

BeetleB wrote: post #21
imgabe wrote: post #13

When you get down into the meat of how the tax credits and Sunrun's financing work it's astonishing. Essentially it sounds like Sunrun's investors are paying to install solar panels on your house so they can claim the tax credit to offset their own income. Meanwhile you are paying Sunrun for the electricity generated by the solar panels. There doesn't seem to be much benefit for the homeowner. You're better off buyin…

>You're better off buying the system up front if possible or even financing it and claiming the tax credit yourself. Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. As for the tax credit, you do get it in the form of a discounted price. Over here, that's how all the solar companies pitch it. They'll install it for cheap, but the condition is that you pay them a big fraction of the tax credit the foll…

An interesting thing touched on in the article is that some folks' tax burdens are low enough that they can't get the full credit anyway -- or at least not in the first year. It sounds like you can take it over a multiple years, but suddenly the minimal up-front price of a lease scheme might make sense versus fronting a ton of money today, and taking your tax credit over years.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#117

Post by josefresco »

This reminded me of a casual conversation with an acquaintance about how they sold their home, with (older) solar panels and had some sort of agreement where they still got paid for the money generated by the panels.

It sounded odd, as in; who would buy a house where something on the roof was generating income for the previous owner? - Wouldn't you (the buyer) just buy them out? No idea how this was structured - anyone have any background?

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#118

Post by merpnderp »

diafygi wrote: post #19

Not trying to discredit or de-emphasize the conclusion, but the ironic thing here is that the utility cost escalation rates that Sunrun had initially calculated were likely based off of pre-solar boom tariff increases. As renewables have started becoming competitive (both utility-scale and distributed), utilities have been able to avoid building more expensive fossil-based power plants and transmission lines as quick…

I'm curious how solar could have put a dent in overall power production needs as peek energy usage comes around 6-8pm when solar panels are producing almost no power. And since utilities need to plan their production around peak usage far more than around overall usage, has solar really done that much to lower utility production requirements?

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#119

Post by floatrock »

Someone1234 wrote: post #110
floatrock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really all that different than putting segment.io onto your site, instrumenting every button click, and A/B testing which color or CTA phrasing results in the highest conversion rates? Just yesterday, there was a front-page post here about the top pricing experiments you can run, full of neat behavioral psychology tricks like decoy pricing and anchoring. Our industry does the same emotional manipulation... we…

Yes, it is really that different. What you're talking about is better connecting with a customer's needs and promoting the product's benefits. There's no losers in that situation, just a customer with more facts of which to make their decision. What that training manual is describing is exploiting someone's primal fears to manipulate them into something they wouldn't have otherwise done: apples and oranges. A better…

Tell me how A/B testing a button's color and placement "better connects with a customer's needs" over maximizing primal attentiveness circuits. Or how implementing decoy pricing and measuring relative price plan conversion funnels "promotes the product's benefits." Tell me how running multiple ad copies for multiple persona-tailored landing pages on a platform that's programmed for automatically rebalancing ad-spend with conversion-maximizing optimization algorithms doesn't trend towards finding the primal fears or urges or whatever that best gets sales.

I'm not saying any of this is good, I'm just saying lets not do holier-than-thou mental gymnastics to pretend the tech industry isn't built on taking these traditional sales scripts and industrializing their effectiveness.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#120

Post by BeetleB »

imgabe wrote: post #23
BeetleB wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're better off buying the system up front if possible or even financing it and claiming the tax credit yourself. Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. As for the tax credit, you do get it in the form of a discounted price. Over here, that's how all the solar companies pitch it. They'll install it for cheap, but the condition is that you pay them a big fraction of the tax credit the foll…

> Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you. Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it'…

>What is scary about solar panel maintenance?

I don't remember the details, but whenever a solar company reaches out to me they list all the maintenance they will perform on the panels (a not insignificant list), and that they will charge for it if I buy it instead of lease. And that's where I tell them they just convinced me not to get solar.

Where I live, every few years I get roof damage due to weather. These would be covered with a lease, but not with a purchase.

Then there are things they don't cover at all. My roof will need to be replaced in the next few years. They said that they'll remove all the panels and reinstall them for a fee (even with a lease). When asked for the amount of the fee, they usually give me a range ("it depends on each situation"). The problem is that fee wipes out quite a lot of the savings. My electricity bill is only about $60 at the moment. With their lease plans, I'll save perhaps only $10/month. A fee of a few hundred dollars wipes out years of savings.

I don't honestly know if maintenance will be a problem in reality. I just know that I can't trust them to let me know what kind of maintenance is involved.

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