I Bought a House with Solar Panels
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I Bought a House with Solar Panels
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Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#2>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it.
That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a for-profit company in an attractive way. This appears to have been crafted as a payment schedule that's slightly back-heavy. Seems to me that the author just didn't want to be left holding the bag, but still wanted to pay lip service and feel like a good environmentalist.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#3>Accounting for all these things, taking on Jug’s lease would translate to us paying at least $30 a month more. We’d lose money from Day 1
I'm unsure how I feel about this. $30 is a significant % of the electric bill, but is a very small % of the cost of owning a home.
Didn't solar start as economically viable due to heavy government tax incentives? I'm ignorant of the data, but I thought solar was not fit for public deployment has only edge use cases.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#4>It’s far more common for home sellers to transfer the lease to the buyer—Sunrun says 94 percent of customers do this—or to prepay the lease and leave the hardware on the roof for the next owner to use. I’ve been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000 and allowed us to support solar and get “free” electricity, even as Sunrun remained responsible for maintenance and repairs.
I'm not surprised Sunrun chose not to tell them about that option as it seems like a losing situation for them. They claim that Sunrun would have been covered, but that merely means they fail to lose money. They stood to make money on that system, and no sane solar panel buyer is going to have heavily used panels put in.
>Aided by a local attorney and my father-in-law, a retired contract attorney, I drafted a letter to Jug’s trust accusing the listing agents of failing to deliver title to the property free of any third-party claims as the agents had said they could. I threatened legal action. It was a last-ditch effort that none of us expected to work. Then it did.
I'm not surprised this worked. Their whole job is to present the actual situation during the sale and they failed at it. There are probably a lot of legal issues with what they did and I bet the agent was quaking in their boots at the thought of that going to trial.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#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. When reviewing a customer’s traditional utility bill, the trainee is told, “amplify the pain significantly.” Among “components of success”: “creating pain and fear.” Among the “five fatal flaws” to avoid: “failing to build pain or fear.”
Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#6I had a very similar experience when selling my house but with vivint solar. I had panels installed less than a year before and soon found out all these issues. Should have read the contract more thoroughly of course, but I am pretty sure the sales people mislead or even lied to me when I asked them questions about what happens if we move etc. Luckily the buyer agreed to take over the lease. If/when I get panels on my new house, I will almost certainly buy them outright.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#7Ahh yes Sunrun. We bought a house and our realtor had the foresight to investigate the situation before we closed on the home. We got a letter disclosing the system was owned free and clear. We setup the online tracking portal only to notice that they transferred the account like thousands of dollars in owed monies from the previous owner. After getting a call from the company trying to strongarm us for the debt we essentially told them to kick rocks.
They should’ve just demanded that money as part of escrow and now they’re left with a debt in someone else’s name that is never going to be paid and likely a headache for us in the future.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#8A few points this person probably didn't think about:
•Nobody knows what California electricity prices are going to do in the next 20 years. By terminating the system, they just traded certainty for volatility. With that attitude I hope they financed using an ARM loan.
•They whined about how expensive it was, but also expressed a desire to have one or two kids someday. When you have kids, your electric bills tend to go up, and they did their math based on their "expected" usage today.
•Santa Barbara has a very mild climate, but I expect in the coming years it will get hotter and muggier much more of the year, and for health reasons they'll have to put a room A/C on. Whoa, now you're using as much juice as Jug did.
•PV rooftop panels in California nowadays don't quite "help the planet" to the extent their owners believe they do. The duck curve continues to get worse.
•A silent majority of people think PV panels are ugly. Like, hideously ugly. They're afraid to speak out, but not to act out and point the finger at a different reason.
The end result of this whole thing reminds me of one of those people 10 years ago who bought a top-end $500 cellphone locked in to a carrier on a 3-year-plan but only $50 a month, let the payments lapse 3 months in, and then tried to sell it on eBay, angry at the cellphone company for financially hobbling them when it wouldn't sell or it got returned.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#9> It appeared that if we bought Jug’s place, we’d have to assume his lease arrangement with Sunrun.
The whole article is worth reading but this headache is specifically related to leased panels. Though, leasing makes going solar easier, it is a terrible idea because of issues like these.
Also, every local power company has different arrangements for residents. I live in Suffolk county, Long Island, New York. Our power company arrangement is amazing. We get to sell back any excess power at the same rate we buy it from them. Meaning, they act like a free battery.
I have a 20 years term that started from the day I installed my panels to use up any excess energy they're holding for me. After that 20 years term is over, they pay me the wholesale rate for any leftover power, which is next to nothing.
I don't pay extra fees for net metering but we do have the highest rates in the nation. It's roughly $0.20/kwh, including delivery, taxes and other fees.
If I end up having any extra power and Crypto is still a thing, I'd just plug in a miner and drain it all. It'd be a bonus if I did it during winter and use the heat to warm the house.
Regarding the purchase, I financed the purchase. Got 0% loan on the expected tax credit portion and 6.5% on the rest for 15 years. Even with the interest rates, I'll be cash-flow positive on the monthly payments.
I also essentially locked in my utility costs. My local power company is expected to raise rates 3-5% a year. If I pay my loan off early, I get to avoid those rate increases for the portion of electricity that my panels cover.
Anyway, if you're thinking about going solar, check your local utility rules and go for the purchase option. Leases are not worth the baggage they come with.
Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels
#10>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…
We got a quote from sun run - it made us uncomfortable how all of their numbers assumed ridiculous utility rate increases. And our gut said we should just wait and purchase instead.
A few years later solar prices came down and we made a purchase with an installer whose main business was purchase, not lease.
edit: I responded below, but my complaint isn't with their price -- it's their scare tactics and fuzzy break even financial calculations assuming wild rate increases. We went with a vendor who was more open and honest about the break even calcs.