Thoughts about my solar install
Someone asked about my solar install and I figure it's worth putting in my blog as being of general interest. I don't talk about it much because my install is NOT in the slightest bit economically feasible: I did it for a variety of reasons that I'll have trouble articulating.
First, what I did NOT do: I do not have a solar hot water install. They tend to have the better bang for the buck if you heat your water with electricity, but we do NOT heat our water with electricity. On the contrary, we have a water heating system that typically costs us about $300/year. On the rare occasion when it has failed we have walked 1/4 mile downhill to the YMCA for our showers. For us, a solar hot water system made no sense.
Honestly, for us it is really hard to make sense of our PV install, too. We live in New England and, although we have a full south facing roof, we still have shitty sunlight here at near the 43rd parallel. Sane people should seriously consider getting a generator, instead.
What I've got is 8 200 watt panels that cost about $5800. Not so bad, right? But then I got an inverter that works for an off-grid install and that was another $2400. Still okay, when you consider 30% tax credits. Then I got an installer to put in the panels. $1500. He brought along an electrician to help him who charged me out of the blue. (This made me very, very crabby: I had my own electrician for connecting up the stuff inside: I'm not sure what this guy did for $1200.) So that was $11K to add a system that would generate about 3 KwH/day. The payback on that? Many many years.
But then I really left the land of the sane. The main reason I was doing this was NOT to save the planet or to save money (phew, lucky for me) but because I wanted to make sure that I had 3 Kwh/day of power no matter what fucktarded stupid thing my society managed to do to us. With 3 KwH/day I can keep my chest freezer going so I can refreeze ice packs to keep refrigeration going. I can run the microwave for cooking or my electric tea kettle for heating water. I can recharge the batteries on my cellphones and/or laptops. I can power my DSL hub and router and a couple of lights. I can power the burner for my oil heating system. With 3 KwH/day my home and business remain functional.
But for an off-grid install I needed to add a battery room and a separate sub-panel in my basement associated with the inverter and a whole lot of switches and rewire a couple of outlets in my house to go to the new panel. I paid (or still owe) another 8K for this. So, $19K.
For this I get an uninterruptible power supply for my business, a battery room that makes me swoon in pleasure, security that my chest freezer full of six month's worth of food - an entire year's harvest - won't go bad.
If I didn't have a business in my home, if I didn't have a peculiar lifestyle in which my freezer contains animals whose names I know, if I didn't think that society teeters on the verge of a major collapse I wouldn't have done this. Or possibly just done it with a $4K generator instead of $11K in solar panels/install.
The other factor that makes me weird is that we've been in the habit for the last dozen years of sinking about $15K a year into home improvements on our decrepit Victorian: it needed major upgrades to every system when we bought it. Doing this sort of upgrade to our house was more normal for us than I think it would be for most people, and came AFTER we'd already upgraded the foundation and several roofs and redone the kitchen and bathroom.
Now that we've put $160K into it and fixed almost everything, I'm starting to worry about over-improving the house for the neighborhood of unsold houses that are NOT currently decrepit but likely to be in a couple of years of standing empty. So one of the advantages of this off-grid install is that I can UNINSTALL it and take it to our next location. I like that.