My 3 Biggest Regrets After 6 Years of Solar (2023)

Introduction

Having solar panels and a home solar system is awesome but these are my 3 biggest regrets, now that I've had solar power for over six years. #solar #solarpower #diy

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Content

My third biggest regret after six years of having solar panels is that we didn't go with an established and reputable company for the installation of the panels shortly after moving into our home here we had several solar sails people knocking on the door, trying to get us to sign up with their solar plans.

So after doing our research and spending several months going through this, we finally settled on a particular company to go with.

And we thought they did a great job.

They were very professional very courteous.

They could answer all of our questions, and they did the install in a great way.

We were very happy with it so much so that we referred our neighbors to them, and they got solar panels from this company and my parents as well.

So needless to say, we felt very confident in this company, but as it turns out within a few years, this company went belly up.

So now we have no options to contact customer service.

If we have questions or inquiries or troubles, there is no technical support for anything.

And there are no offerings for upgrades or compatibility issues anything like that we are on our own, because we didn't go with a reputable company if I were starting from scratch today and wanted to have a company install solar for me.

I would look at a few different things.

I would do plenty of homework and research online to make sure there are plenty of good reviews for the support for the quality of the products for the warranties and for the installation options as well.

So one of the companies that I've been checking out and been very impressed with is actually tesla if you're not familiar.

They actually make, of course, the solar roofs that you may have heard of with the different actual individual shingles and everything.

But they also sell a totally traditional solar panel system, or you can get a solar panel system with the power wall battery backup.

Now, the cool thing about tesla that I've seen is that they will match any competitors price or even beat any competitors price, which is pretty awesome that they have your standard 25-year warranty that just about all of the companies out there offer and then they're available to do installs in all 50 states, which is pretty amazing.

So it's, a big company, it's reputable.

They have a great set of apps and services that go along with it.

So that you can keep an eye on everything and it's tesla it's, not your neighborhood, joe who you're not sure if they're going to be around in a few years.

So that's one, I would look at.

But that said this year after all the research I've done if I were to do this again today, I would do it myself.

I would hire an electrician and work with him or her to try to get everything set up to where I get my permits.

I could make sure that everything was wired and measured correctly as far as amperage and voltage and supplying what we need.

So that's the route I would go not long ago.

I discovered a company in central utah that actually sells all of the parts and products that you would need to do your own solar system, whether that's a grid tied system or an off-grid system, and they source all of the materials directly from the manufacturer.

So you're, not paying all that bloated, middleman fees where it's going through two or three hands.

So their prices are insanely good, but you can also still get everything.

You need for a fraction of the cost of going through an installer, for example.

And a lot of it is not as difficult as you might think, but you've got options.

So tesla is one.

I would look at if you're looking to do something with an installer.

I would also strongly encourage you to check out all of the other options out there like there's, momentum, solar there's, blue, raven, solar, there's sunrun and a bunch of others.

But those are some big companies that are well established have good warranties and guarantees on their products and you're, not worried about them being gone.

The next day.

I've also discovered, however, that you can put together a solar system, that's, not super difficult to install, and you could work with a professional to help you with that.

And it could actually cost you less to do your own solar system with a full battery backup than it would cost you to pay someone to do a solar system installed without a battery backup so definitely check out your options and see what's out there I'll, put links in the description below to all of this.

And I actually have a coupon for 250 off any installation with tesla.

If you want to give that a try too my second biggest regret after six years of solar is that we never had a monitoring and alert system installed on our solar panel system.

So if something were to go wrong with that, we wouldn't know, unless we physically went out and checked and I'll talk more about that in just a second.

So for the most part, when you set up your solar panels and everything is installed correctly, it's kind of a set it and forget it sort of situation you don't have to worry about constantly checking it.

It is kind of fun, though to see how it's doing how these sunny days are happening.

And you might even notice in this video that there are clouds.

And so the sun will come and go.

And that of course affects how much your solar panels are able to produce here in utah.

For example, last year we had this insane dust, storm mixed with a rainstorm that coated everything in mud.

And so the car washes had like mile long backups and everything was just dirty and gross doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

And it was obvious at that time that I needed to clean my solar panels.

So I got up on the roof, and I washed them down and thought I was good as it turns out, I mostly rinsed them and didn't do a great job at washing them.

So as a result of that kind of shoddy workmanship in july and august, which are typically some of my best producing months.

I produce 30 percent less power than I normally would have because there was kind of a gross film on them.

That was blocking the sun's rays from coming in now that's.

Not the only time that's happened.

But I haven't been aware of it because there's nothing telling me, I don't have an app.

I don't have any really easy way to see that.

In fact, my inverter it's, a string inverter that I've got out here.

And as you can see, this is really difficult to see anything on it.

At this point.

This is not even seven years old yet and it's just fogged over it's cloudy it's, the kind where you tap on it to change the different screens.

It doesn't really matter.

I really can't see what's going on anymore.

So I'm kind of out of touch with how that's doing now, because of the issue that I mentioned for my third biggest regret.

I no longer can contact the company that I bought this from and get some support to get an internet module, installed I'm on my own to try to figure that out so that's, what I'm working on right now I'll get that installed, but it's, a bigger pain in the butt than if I would have just been able to call a company and say, what do I need? And that leads me to my number one, biggest regret after six years of solar.

And that is having the wrong sized system.

I thought that we were making some really wise choices and really thinking ahead when we purchased our solar system, we have a 7.65 kilowatt system.

There are six of us in the house.

And at the time that was more than enough, we definitely factored in some growth in there, knowing that as the kids got older, they might use more electricity have more people over all that sort of thing.

And that as technology increased our consumption of power would likely increase as well.

But what we didn't foresee is the fact that these kids are using a lot of electricity that I have 20 3d printers now, but I have a wood shop with a bunch of power hungry tools that I'm now, a full-time youtuber, and I stay home.

And that eats up a lot of energy, just by virtue of me being home, all the time using more air conditioning using my computers and different things like that and that's to say, nothing of what happened during the pandemic.

When we had six people at home, all the time using devices the entire time, oh yeah and then there's that little stint where I spent four months mining, crypto and like tripled, our electric bill so there's that too.

So as you can imagine, our consumption of power has steadily increased as we've become more and more dependent on technologies and spend more and more time at home.

However, our production from the solar panels has not increased.

And as a result, we are now instead of paying nine dollars a month, which for rocky mountain power, who we use as our power supply is the minimum that you can pay.

And we did that for years.

Then we started seeing twenty dollar bills and 40 and 60.

And then we even have reached numbers of 200 and that's again.

During that crypto time when we were just producing very little because of the winter and using a ton of energy, but that is not what I want to see.

I want to see it keep up.

So now I've got two options.

The first option is that I can just be happy that I've got solar producing something and pay the difference that's, a totally reasonable option.

But the second option that I'm more interested in is, how do I expand my system to have more available power to match our power consumption needs? So with that, I can add more solar panels up to our roof, and I can use micro inverters, which allow you to add as many as you need without the string, inverter, the one larger inverter to handle everything and having it scaled.

Just so so that's one option.

Another option is to look at maybe doing a separate solar setup, that's on the ground, that's, a little more adjustable over time.

I can sell some panels off if we're producing more than we need.

I can also add more if we need to so that's, what I'm going to be looking into.

But I just wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of some of the few larger factors that are important when you're considering how to get solar and what to do with it.

Now, after mentioning these three regrets, you might be thinking, are you regretting getting solar? And the answer is absolutely not I'm.

So glad I got solar, I would do it again today in a heartbeat.

And I recommend to everyone to check it out, but do your homework and make sure that you know what you're getting and that you get what's best for your situation.

Thanks for watching today.

My name is nils with learn to diy and we'll see you on the next one.