So I pulled the plug on solar and the contract has been signed. The numbers for solar are getting even more insane as Keith has found even more available Nyserda grant money. How I love Keith.
So you can see that I’m getting a $26,891 solar installation for essentially $9,390 out of pocket. This article about how investing in solar compares with investing in the stock market and why I think that solar makes more sense for pretty much everyone.
NY State is late. In 2017 they came up with a bunch of sweeping legislation which included a changeover on Jan 1, 2019 to switch to a ‘different rate’ for buying and selling electricity. By some divine act of providence, it turns out they are late coming up with that ruling, so there is still some time for me to get grandfathered in under the old system. It turns out that the net metering system on my current system is generating as much as it says it’s generating, but the problem is that I’m using a lot more than what the system is showing me. The problem is that when the power travels through my breaker box and gets used before it hits Nyseg, it never registers as power usage on the current flow clamps on the main lines. It’s not that big of a deal, it just means I’m going to need a lot more solar than I have right now. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I just got 24 panels 8.28kWand a 7kW inverter. I just signed a bid 5 minutes ago for another 9.66kW of panels and a 7.7kW inverter which should more than double my current capacity.
I’m already 20 grand in the hole, what’s another 20 grand right?
This year I decided to go solar at my house. The projections called for me to get the payback period within 15 years (and only 9 years if I manage to get all the tax rebates which is unlikely). I was not satisfied with a 15 year payback so I started thinking about ways I could cut that down to less than 5 years instead. Seemed to me there are 2 ways to do that :
I decided that the best course of action was to do both. Since I could not afford an electric car with the range I would need I purchased a 12,000 BTU Mitsubishi Air/Air heat exchanger from Sylvaine.com for $1599 shipped (available here). As a side not you need to get a line set with the heat pump which will add another $99-200 depending on the length. There are much cheaper Chinese units out (like 1/2 the price) there but my hope is that I’ll be able to get parts for it when it breaks and that it will last at least 10 years. I talked to lots of people with Mitsubishi heat pumps and they all love them. One thing that I really hate is this disposable society where people just throw things away rather than trying to fix them. I will do a separate article in the future on installing the heat pump and a review.
A Minisplit heat pump can heat with about 1/3 the amount of electricity as an electric space heater
This article is mainly talking about the process of connecting the breaker boxes for my tenants together and turning them into sub-panels and setting it up so that their electricity usage is automatically tracked and they are billed every month using Eyedro energy monitors.
I’ve been procrastinating about going solar for a long time, probably too long. I’ve been waiting for panels to get as cheap as possible while the incentives are the best they can be. With Trump’s tariffs on solar panels I didn’t think that now would be a good time to go solar, but once I ran the numbers I found out I was wrong. Today I signed my soul away to Renovous so I could go solar.
So here’s a bad image showing you how awesome my solar installation will hopefully be. Essentially I’m getting a $24,811 installation for $8,956 out of pocket. That includes 8.28Kw of solar panels and a 7Kw inverter. To give you a comparison my wife has an off-grid system with a whopping 1.5Kw of panels and she is into it for almost $10,000 and it was installed for free by a close friend of hers. Of that $10,000 about $3000 is batteries and she is already on her third set (spoiler alert, get Trojans, everything else sucks ass).
Tiny Chestnut Paradise 