solar panels (il)

[Vogz]

So me and the wife decided to go solar. 23 panels @360 watts with microinverters. I’ll be getting $10,702 in SRECs and $9923 in federal tax credit. Not looking forward to having to juggle the panels around when redoing my roof but whatever. System is predicted to save over $17000 in 25 years

Sweet, You'll love them. I've $15 power bills (fee for having electrical service) since March while my neighbors had $400 to $700 power bills through the summer with the heat we had.

 

[Stink Star]

Those are crazy bills though. The highest I’ve had was like $160 which is crazy because we also have an ELR and I keep my house like a meat locker in the summer.

 

[Nccstud]

My problem is in the winter with fucking electric heat. Need to get my old house sold and then look heavily into solar panels again. $450 heat bills in the winter are brutal

 

[Stink Star]

Well when doing electric, ComEd let’s you put up panels that produce 110% of your average output over the last year (in practice they will allow maybe 102% though). So theoretically if you could fit enough panels to meet that criteria you could collect enough net metering credits in the summer to take care of your winter electrical demand. Problem is that would take a lot of panels and make the system pretty damn expensive.

One interesting tidbit I learned actually is that the summer/winter usage vs production isn’t as big as most people think. Obviously you’ll make more power at noon in August than in January but it isn’t as big a difference as at least I suspected. The biggest difference between summer and winter is the daytime/nighttime ratio. There are just more hours of usable sunlight in the summer and that is the biggest user of net metering credits, not season. Hope that explanation makes sense

 

[Nccstud]

Yeah, getting an efficient wood burning insert is the first thing on my list. It should greatly help my heating needs in the winter