We are finally going solar after MUCH hesitation (mostly on my part honestly). Something about people knocking on my door during dinnertime just put me off to the whole thing. I never really trusted much of what the salesman had to say anyway and I don’t like to make any decisions on the spot. So I spent a good deal of time researching what the entire process entailed from start to finish. I sought out to answer questions like:

The benefits of going solar?

What are the most reputable companies?

The difference between buying and leasing your panels?

What happens if we sell the house?

As it turned out, my husband knew someone locally who was a salesman for a company called SunRun who had reached out to him about going solar. He told him “probably not”, because he knew how skeptical I was. I was SO annoyed by all the salesman, seriously they were incessant. However, I said ok let’s look into it if that’s what you want to do. So I researched the company, found some bad reviews but mostly good ones and said ok, let’s go for it.

My husband’s buddy set up a meeting with us to discuss the full process of going solar and I had ALL the questions on deck. There are several options you can go for, we decided not to buy because we didn’t want the financial commitment honestly.

Our Current Electric Bill

They ran the numbers and gave us an estimate of how many panels our house could accommodate and what our monthly costs would be. I was STILL hesitant here because we are on an equal pay program with our utility. It’s exactly $319 month. At the end of the year (September for us) we either pay the difference in what we owe or we get a credit.

You can see in the image above that we have paid more than we’ve used so far but, summertime is drawing near. Typically, June-August are our highest months for energy consumption. We are running the pool filter for the majority of the day every day and coupled with the ac running, the bills are definitely higher.

For reference (and for those of you who are curious how a pool affects your bill lol) our bills for last summer:

June – July: $450 ($17 gas)

July – August: $456 ($20 gas)

August – September: $367.61- plus an extra $194 difference from our equal pay program that we owed

Compare that during the rest of the year when our bill hovers between $150-$200.

Going Solar Money Savings?

So initially, I’m like ok cool, going solar I should have like a $10 bill every month now right? Since the front of my house is slathered in sun all day long, I should be pocketing some decent savings every month no? Not the case lol. We are leasing the panels so our monthly bill will be $204 paid directly to SunRun. We still have to pay our gas portion directly to PSE&G, our gas/electric provider.

Our system is calculated to produce 99% of the energy we currently use. Anything over, we pay. The benefit though, is if we are under. Anything we produce that we don’t use, is credited back to us and can be used to pay the gas portion of our bill. If the system doesn’t produce 99% of what SunRun estimated (12,599kWh), they pay us the difference.

Right now we are in step 5 of the going solar process:

We signed our initial agreement on March 8th. The problem was, we couldn’t get the system installed until we got a new roof! We were ready to say forget it (because hello, definitely do not have new roof money) but that process was pretty straightforward. This post is long enough so I’m off to lay out that process in a new post.

Let me know if you have any questions about going solar!