Yearly solar energy use graph

phoenixtropicals · Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:26 am Post subject: Yearly solar energy use graph

We live in Mesa AZ. Here is a graph of my yearly electricity use. I have a 5kW system. My house is one story 1870 sq. ft., and fairly well insulated. My house is all electric, so I don't have any gas heating, oven etc. In the winter, we keep the house at 74 °F during the day and and 73°F at night. In the summer, we keep the house at 78°F during the day and 77 °F at night.

The surplus production spikes you see in the middle of times of the year with lots of use usually means we were out of town.

phoenixtropicals · Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:35 am Post subject: Solar Energy Bills

Show me the money you say? Here it is. It was actually a fairly untypically year. It got unusually cold in the winter with 7 total days hard freezes, and a brutal August with 3 weeks over 115°F. Keep in mind that the bill lags the actual month by a month. So, the September bill was for August weather.

ajbcirc · Joined: 13 Apr 2011 Posts: 97

How much did your 5kW system cost, including installation?

phoenixtropicals · Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 2:25 pm Post subject:

After all of the incentives about $8000. It saves me about $1000 a year. SRP's incentives aren't as good as they used to be though. As SRP gets closer to meeting their 20% renewable energy goal they are reducing their incentives. The state and federal incentives are still the same I believe. The company I installed with was American Solar Electric. I had a good experience with them.

RyanPowell · Joined: 05 Nov 2013 Posts: 1

phoenixtropicals · Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2013 8:24 am Post subject:

It was $8000 including everything. Labor, blue prints, all the documentation needed by the city, yes everything. The original cost was about 25k, but SRP, our power company, covered half of that and the federal and state incentives totalled about 3k, so I was left with a bill of 8k.

The SRP incentives have gone down since then because they are closer to reaching their mandate of having 20% of their power come from renewables. For that 12.5 k they gave me I had to sign the environmental credits over to them.

As far as I can calculate, those companies that lease panels on your roof (solar city for example) are not as good a deal as buying your own panels, because the company gets all the incentives. So, with the price reduced the payments on a loan for the panels is less than they are charging you for the lease. That is why they make money. It would be cheaper (lower monthly payment) for you to take out a loan to buy the panels yourself and then you would actually own the panels yourself when its all over. The one and only advantage of leasing the panels is that you don't have a down payment. Then again you can get loans that come pretty close to that anyways.

The company I had do the installation was American Solar Electric. They did a very good job and have already replaced the Inverter under warranty because it went bad. The gave me no grief whatsoever about replacing this hardware and did it right away. The inverter all by itself is worth about 6k I think.

http://www.americanpv.com/

phoenixtropicals · Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2013 8:35 am Post subject:

Once you do get some panels. Here is a post about which SRP rate plan to use.

http://phoenixtropicals.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=188