Solar Panels

Solar panels are big in Colorado, what with all the clear skies and sunny days. After being randomly approached on the sidewalk by hungry salespeople, we decided to look into it. Dan made the mistake of putting his contact info into solarquote.com and got a ridiculous number of sales calls. He did a bunch of research and finally settled on SunRun, which makes high-quality panels for reasonable prices, and reasonable customer service. 

How much power we could get depended on our energy usage history, the cost, and how much sunlight we get. There was some homework for each of these steps.  We were determined to get panels in 2020 because it is one of the last years with a generous federal subsidy and low interest rates, so that helped make the whole project a bit more cost effective.  But that meant that we didn't have a tremendous amount of usage data, since we hadn't been in the house for more than a few months.  Still, we figured that, with growing children, we probably wouldn't end up with more production than we needed. 

What efficiency we could physically get - and where we were able to place the panels - was determined by visual curb appeal as well as on some cool satellite imagery of sunlight during the year. 

Once the deal was struck, a couple truckloads of panels and men with man-buns showed up to do the installation on Halloween, which was great fun for the family to watch.  Unfortunately it took another 3 months for Xcel, our power provider, to actually turn the panels on. Shameless. But, still, very exciting when it did get turned on, because our meter now runs backwards!

from 9 am 

to 4 pm