A busy day! I went to lunch at Rotary with Twana. She gave a 30 minute presentation explaining the idea of a carbon footprint and how we are trying to cut ours in half in the next 3 years. The audience literally gasped when they saw how large a portion of our CO2 emissions come from air travel. Twana asked for a show of hands of members of the audience: had anyone ever calculated their carbon footprint? Not a single hand was raised.
Right after lunch I met with Don Giberson from SolarCity. He brought over the paperwork so we could finally order our solar system. There were lots of papers to sign -- about as many as when we bought our last new car. I signed everything and handed him the check for the downpayment. It feels good!
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Congrats on signing with SolarCity! We're talking with them tomorrow morning, and I've got a summary of the last 24 months of PG&E bills to show...
Would you mind sharing the details of how many square feet of panels, the kW rating, and any other details you've got?
Are you planning on making any other upgrades? Electric Water Heater? Electric Furnace? Electric Stove? What were their recommendations for these kinds of parallel upgrades?
Hi Steve,
Our system size is 2,183 AC watts. Because our roof space is constricted, we opted for higher wattage (205 STC-watt / 193.5 PTC-watt) panels, which cost $.50/watt more. We will have 12 Sanyo panels, model HIP-205BA3.
If the co-op gets enough subscribers, out price will be $8.40 watt, or $11,033 after the CEC rebate of $2.43/watt and our $2,000 federal tax credit.
We hope we will be able to get the E-7 time of use rate from PG&E. If we do, the system will probably allow us to zero out our electric bill.
We don't have any plans to change our appliances, and SolarCity made no recommendations along those lines. We have already done a lot to minimize our electricity consumption, and after our solar system is installed we will no doubt do more -- and also focus on shifting our demand away from the peak hours of noon to 6 PM during the summer.
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