Thoughts on Solar

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in our three-part series:
My Electric Bill is So High! Will Solar Help? 
You can read part one, How High is High, here.

Unless you have been living completely offline and in a cave, you are aware that there are lots of solar companies out there looking for your business.  You’ve seen them on the Web, perhaps they have called you or even knocked on your door.  You probably realize that you should do your homework and get several quotes before going forward, but how do you even know where to look?  Fear not, we’ve got you covered!

Why Trust Matters

For most homeowners, purchasing a solar power system will be one of the most expensive purchases they ever make, after their home, their education, and a new car.  Moreover, a solar power system is supposed to co-exist with your home happily for the next twenty years or more.  For all of that to work out, you need to find someone you trust.  Your gut is a good gauge here – if someone makes you uncomfortable now, chances are you will be even less comfortable down the road.

Qualifications Count…

In the search for qualified contractors there are some basic qualifications, and there are more sophisticated ones.  Let’s start with the basics: is this contractor licensed?  In California it is easy to check that out, simply by going to the Contractors’ State License Board and search on their license number (it should be on the contractor’s website) or their name.  If they don’t have a valid license, run, don’t walk, away from them! 

Beyond just checking to see if they have a license, you can also check for the type of license (only A, B, C-10, and C-46 license holders are authorized to install solar), whether there are any public complaints against them, and the status of their bonding and workers compensation insurance.

That covers the basics, but how about something more substantive?  After all, you could hold any of the necessary licenses and never have worked on a solar power system in your life! Toward that end, there is no greater indication of qualifications than to be a Certified PV Installation Professional by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP), a distinction I’ve been honored to hold since 2010.

How select are NABCEP Certified PV Installation Professionals?  According to CALSSA, there are some 86,000 solar workers in California, of which just 294 hold that NABCEP Certification, according to the NABCEP website. 

As NABCEP puts it:

When you hire a contractor with NABCEP Certified Installers leading the crew, you can be confident that you are getting the job done by solar professionals who have the “know-how” that you need.
They are part of a select group of professionals who have distinguished themselves by being awarded NABCEP Certified Installer credentials.

You can search for a Certified PV Installation Professional on the NABCEP website here.

So does Reputation

If checking qualifications matters when it comes to finding a contractor that you can trust, then so to does assessing their reputation, which these days is easier than ever to do.  Search sites, like Google, display reviews for local businesses (keep in mind the top few listings are paid ads), and major review sites will let you see lots of reviews of solar contractors “near” you.  (Near in scare quotes because often those companies are saying they will serve your area even if they are located far away.) 

More localized resources, like Nextdoor and Neighbor-2-Neighbor, provide a more cultivated collection of contractors from which you can choose.

Of course, nothing beats getting a recommendation from someone you trust who has gone solar, had a great experience, and their system has lived up to expectations.  If you don’t know anyone like that, you should ask your prospective contractors for a list of clients that you can contact.  Naturally, the contractor is going to list people who will tell you great things, but ask to come by and see the installation for yourself. 

Other factors to consider…

Years in Business

Companies that have been in business a long time may or may not do better work than a relative newcomer, but at least they have shown that they know how to remain in business.  (In the solar industry, that is not a small accomplishment.)   Older companies usually have more experience – although a newer company could compensate by hiring well-experienced people – and experience is important since every project presents its own, unique challenges.

Local vs National

National companies are sometimes perceived as having an advantage because they have the whole “economy of scale” thing going for them.  Yet often those “savings” aren’t going to the consumer, they are going to shareholders or venture capitalists who have funded the operation. 

Local companies, on the other hand, live or die on their reputation.  They can’t simply write-off a territory and expand somewhere else – if they fail locally, they are doomed.  So local companies often provide much better service to their clients.  On top of that, the money you spend on a local company helps support your own, local economy.  And hey, if you have a problem, you may well bump into your installer in the grocery store and you can tell her all about it!

Next Steps…

Ok - by now you know that your home is a good solar candidate, and you have found several trustworthy contractors.  Now all you need to do is look over their bids, choose the best one, and off you go!  But wait, how do choose the best bid?  Fear not, dear reader, that is coming in Part 3: Evaluating Competing Solar Proposals. 

We hear it all the time: “My electric bill is so high, I just want to stick it to [insert name of utility here]!  Can solar help?” Now we are in the business of selling and installing solar, so our preferred answer is, “Of Course!"  But that is not always the answer we end up giving.  So Part 1 of this three-part series focuses on that electric bill to answer a few questions first: 1) How high is it? 2) What can you do to make it lower - pre-solar? And 3) Is your home even a good candidate for going solar?  Let’s look at each in turn…

How High is High?

Ask most any consumer how high their electric bill is and they will all pretty much tell you – too high!  So let’s recognize a few things at the start: if you are a PWP or DWP customer, your electric bills will be lower than your compatriots sufferi, er, living, in SCE territory.  SCE bills monthly, whereas PWP and DWP bill (roughly) every two months.  Most non-solar, residential customers are on a tiered rate structure - that is, the more you use, the more you pay for what you are using.  That said, not all tiered rates are alike: SCE has a true, three-tier rate structure where the cost increases in each subsequent tier, whereas PWP has a bizarre structure where the “highest” tier is actually cheaper than the middle tier!  (I wonder how many PWP customers realize that perverse incentive?) 

Taken together, what can you say about how high is high?  We would break it down roughly this way:

• $100 per month or less - Solar is probably not going to pencil out for you.  While there are many reasons to go solar besides the economic ones, if your bill is this low, saving money is not going to justify solar.
  
  
• $100 to $300 per month – depending on the other factors discussed below, bills in this range are more likely to have a strong economic justification, particularly in DWP territory, where a small rebate remains to help lower your out-of-pocket cost.
  
  
• $300 or more per month – Solar is exactly what you need!  The higher your bill, the more solar makes sense.  (We had a client with bills that averaged over $1,000 per month!  His payback was four and a half years!)

To illustrate how and why that works, let’s look at the modeling that goes into sizing your system.  (For this analysis we made use of Energy Toolbase, one of the most sophisticated tools available for modeling the performance of PV systems and producing comprehensive, authoritative and transparent solar proposals.)  We created three different usage profiles corresponding to the categories set forth above.  All were SCE customers under the current Domestic rate structure in region 9 (i.e., Altadena).  The first had usage such that their average bill was under $100/month.  The second had bills between $200 and $300/month, and the third had bill in excess of $450/month.  In each case, summer usage was higher than the rest of the year.

Energy Toolbase allows an installer to run multiple simulations of total bill savings based on the size of the system to be installed.  On the right is that output for our middle-case client.  It’s a little hard to see in the small version of the graph (click on it for larger), but the light green line (which represents the savings under the new, SCE-forced rate structure) levels off at 7.9 kW.  That inflection point means that a system sized larger than that is no longer providing a full economic benefit to the client.

We performed similar analyses for the other two use cases to determine the optimal system size, and to then determine their savings and payback.  Here are our results:

As system size increases, even without assuming any improvement in price based on economy of scale (the system price in each case is $4.00/Watt), it is clear that larger systems have significantly greater return on investment over the life of the system.  If your bills fall into that third use case, you are going to benefit greatly by adding solar.  But in that first use case, not so much.

What can you do to make your bills lower – before adding solar?

However, even if your use case makes sense, it is important to consider some low-hanging fruit before plunking down thousands of dollars on a solar power system.  The two most obvious candidates for investment are pool pumps and air conditioning systems. 

Pool Pumps

Older pool pumps tend to have single speed motors, which means that they draw the same amount of energy all the time.  But harken back to your elementary school science classes: a body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to stay in motion.  (Thank you, Isaac Newton!)  What’s that got to do with pool pumps?  Well, all that water in your pool has  a lot of mass and when it is just sitting there it takes a great deal of energy to get it moving - it’s a big body at rest!  But once you get it moving, it is relatively easy to keep it moving, so you need to expend a lot less energy to do so. 

Single-speed pool pump motors don’t get that, and they just keep pumping as hard as they can the entire time they are on.  That is wasteful, and expensive.  A variable-speed pump, on the other hand, embraces the eternal wisdom of Sir Newton, and throttles down over time.  That saves energy, and thus money.  Even better, utilities like SCE will give you a rebate (from SCE that is $200!) toward the cost of installing a variable-speed pool pump.

Updated A/C

The other big opportunity for savings is in an updated A/C system.  Newer systems are significantly more efficient out-of-the-box, and as older systems age, their efficiency decreases, meaning they are costing you more to operate.

Other Savings Opportunities

You don’t really have an old refrigerator running in your garage, do you?  If it is old, it is inefficient, and you’ve just put it in the hottest part of your home (short of the attic) so it has to work really hard to keep that case of beer cold.  Either ditch it altogether, or only run it when that party is about to happen!

How old is your thermostat?  Does it even work, or do you just use it as an on/off switch?  New, smart thermostats can save you money - and there is likely a rebate there, too!

How good a candidate is your home for solar?

Ok, your use case is compelling, even after harvesting all that luscious, low-hanging fruit.  So is it now certain that solar will help?  Um, maybe.  How good of a candidate is your home for solar?

We have written about this at length before, for example here and here.  If you have lots of shading, your house will not be a good candidate – you don’t want to be the owner of a system installed under a tree!

But other issues can change the value proposition for installing solar.  For example, your electrical service might be ancient and undersized, requiring you to spend additional money to upgrade to a newer, larger service.  If you are installing a relatively large PV system, that is a relatively small increase, but on our small use case, upgrading your service panel can add 10 to 15% to the total cost.

Other factors that are not show-stoppers but which increase costs are second-story and/or steeply pitched roofs (both of which just make the labor costs higher because the work goes slower), roofs other than composition shingles, service panels located far from where the array needs to go (like the array on a detached garage but the service panel in on the side of the house with a concrete driveway in between).

How can you know for sure?  Simple, have a professional installer come out and do a proper site evaluation.  So how do you find such a person?  Ah, that is the subject of Part 2: How Do I Find Someone to Trust?

Our friends over at Enphase Energy just completed their most recent survey of solar clients who chose Enphase for their PV system.  Since all of our clients for years now have benefitted from having an Enphase system installed, the insights that Enphase gleaned are pretty relevant to understanding our clients here at Run on Sun.  So what did they find out?

Enphase identified three goals for their survey: Determine how homeowners decided to go solar and choose their installer; assess the role of brand name products in the purchasing decision; and see what, if any, questions remained unanswered.  Let’s take those one at a time.

How Enphase Customers Chose Their Installer

Solar companies employ a variety of strategies for finding new clients, from door-to-door canvassing or cold calling leads, to print, radio, or TV advertising, as well as word of mouth.  Of course, all but that last avenue can be trod simply by throwing money at the problem. Hence the very high cost of acquisition that we see for some of the national chains, in some cases upwards of $3,000/client! 

How did Enphase customers choose their installer?  The results are quite interesting:

Now that is interesting - over two-thirds of Enphase customers found their installer either by referrals or from doing their own Internet research!  This tracks very closely with our own experience: we don’t purchase leads, we don’t cold-call people, and we don’t go knocking on their doors.  We do devote a lot of energy to having a quality Internet presence (via both our website and this blog), and a significant percentage of our new clients are referrals from our earlier ones.  It looks like we are meeting Enphase customer where they are looking!

It is interesting to see that third result - “My installer found me” - clearly represents all of those things we don’t do!  So that explains why you are still getting dozens of calls and knocks on your door asking you to go solar – for 1 in 5 customers that approach works, at least when it comes to signing on the line that is dotted!  (Actually, we use a solid line, but that’s an issue for another post!)

Oh, and those other forms of advertising?  Looks pretty much like money down the drain – ouch!

The Importance of Product Branding

So now we know how these Enphase customers found installers to consider, but how did they make their purchase decision?  Survey says:

Not surprisingly, the installer’s reputation was the most important factor, cited by nearly half of all respondents – which dovetails nicely with choosing the installer based on referrals.  

At roughly 30% each, the brand name of the solar panel, and the inverter was important in the decision.  This is interesting to me, and consistent with our experience.  Maybe one client in three has a strong view on either the panel or the inverter when we first speak with them.  Of course, that means LG and Enphase because that is all that we install.   I suspect if you were to look at this question five years ago, the number of respondents saying brand was important to them would have been much smaller.

Oh, and again, the survey shows that we are missing out on one in five potential clients since their installer offered a variety of products from which to choose.  In our view that is something of an abdication of our responsibility as pros.  Our clients want to rely upon our expertise to guide them to the right choice – how are they supposed to know what it the best inverter or solar panel out there?

Questions, questions!

An important part of the installation process is to manage client expectations, and a key component of that is to answer their questions.  So how good a job are installers doing at answering those questions?  Survey says:

The overwhelming number of Enphase installers are answering their clients questions – good job!  But interestingly, about one in five clients are being left in the dark about questions that they had regarding their systems.  (I wonder if this is the same one in five who had the installer find them?)

For folks who have questions, what is it that they most want to know?  Again, these open questions reflect on the need to manage expectations:

Not surprisingly, the number one question, asked by a 60% of respondents, is how does the production from the solar system relate to their electric bill!  This is an extremely common concern – leading to that famous complaint: I’ve got solar, why is my bill so high?  I think the evidence is overwhelming that solar installers need to do a better job of explaining how these systems will work in real life.  

Are you a recent solar consumer?  How do these results match up with your experience?  We would love to hear your thoughts/experiences in the comments!

Laurel Hamilton - Solar Pro - Solar Hero!

You hear a lot about solar companies with shady business practices, and frankly, it is often enough to make me worry about this industry that I love.  But today we have a feel-good story about folks going the extra mile to make things right - and it stars Laurel Hamilton, recently of Run on Sun, who now works for Elemental Energy in Bend, Oregon.  Here’s the scoop…

Legend Solar is a Utah-based installation company that was operating in three states: Utah, Nevada, and Oregon.  I say it was operating because a recent report in the Salt Lake Tribune highlighted the financial difficulties of the company, and pointed out that dozens of homeowners who had signed contracts with Legend - and in many cases had already paid in full - were being left high and dry as Legend was unable to complete their projects.  Indeed, the Tribune story focuses on Utah homeowners who appear to be without recourse to get their projects completed.  Ouch!

But not so in Oregon.

Spurred on by the Energy Trust of Oregon and the Oregon Solar Energy Industries Association, companies like Elemental Energy have stepped into the breach, working around the clock to meet an April 1 deadline for completion so that the stranded homeowners will qualify for the Oregon State tax credit. 

Frank Andorka, writing at SolarWakeup, picked up the story from Laurel, and is up with his take: Oregon Solar Installers Back Legend’s Customers.  Frank’s bottom line: “When one solar company stumbles, it’s up to the rest of us to make sure it doesn’t take the rest of the industry down with it." 

We agree completely, but that is easier said than done.

Instead, it has taken the dedicated work of true solar pros, like Laurel and her crew from Elemental, to make that difference.  Here’s how Laurel described their efforts:

My company has stepped up to fulfill the orders left in the lurch by the out-of-state solar company that went bankrupt. We are doing this at a loss because we believe in supporting the solar industry in Oregon and in making sure people still get their systems as promised.

My team is working overtime every single day to get these systems in by the deadline to get clients their tax credit. Once they do, they’ll have beautiful solar systems providing their homes with 100% clean renewable energy from the sun for more than 25 years. So we’re exhausted but it’s worth it. This is what working in solar and working for a positive company, doing this for the right reasons, is all about. We don’t want the news to scare people into not trusting solar contractors.

It is people like you, Laurel, that they trust, and they do so because of your professionalism and integrity.

So a big Run on Sun shout out to Laurel, the rest of the folks working beside her at Elemental Energy, and all the other Oregon solar pros who are working together to make it right.  You set a very high bar for the rest of us, and you make us proud to be part of the same industry with you.

At Run on Sun we like to think of ourselves as true Solar Pros - years of experience, NABCEP certified, yadda, yadda, yadda!  But this post is about doing something wrong (nicely done, Jim) and having to figure out a way to fix it (thank you, Sara!).  We recount it here because it might help some of our colleagues who just might make the same mistake!

Run on Sun is a huge Enphase shop, and one of the reasons why is the great monitoring that we get for every installation.  For installers, we can see module-level data that allows us to determine not only if there is a problem with the array, but where that problem is!  (Contrast this with a string array, where determining where a problem resides can be an error-prone and time-consuming process.) 
Check out this sample from one of our systems:

This is from a recent install using LG 360 Watt, back-contact modules with Enphase IQ6+ microinverters. As you can see this is a very consistent array with the output power ranging from 288 to 291 Watts at each module.  But you might ask yourself, how does the system know which module/microinverter is which?  The answer is easy - each microinverter has an associated serial number, and it sends that serial number to the monitoring device (called an Envoy) when it reports its performance.  When the installer “builds” the array in the cloud, she maps the serial numbers from the microinverters to the layout as installed.

To facilitate that mapping, Enphase provides a peel-off label on each microinverter.  The installer removes the sticker and places it on a map, to be pared with the online layout.  When we are doing our installs, I am often the person responsible for collecting the labels onto the map, and then later using that map to build the system online.  I’ve been doing this for years, and never had a problem.

Until the other day.

I got back to the office, ready to build out our array online, only to discover - there’s no map!  Mind you, I remember clearly creating the map, and I would have sworn I put it in the car right after doing so, but it was nowhere to be found!  Yikes!  Now what do we do?

To be sure, the serial number were still on the microinverters, but they could not be read from where they are located on the roof!  Ugh - we could remove the modules (of our otherwise operational system) but that would be a huge amount of work - there has got to be a better way!

Cue Sara - Problem Solver Extraordinaire!

Indeed there was as Project Coordinator, and problem solver extraordinaire, Sara Pavey quickly observed.  We could connect to the Envoy using a smart phone (it has a WiFi hot spot built in), and look at the data coming from the array.  If we were to shade one module at a time, we could see which microinverter’s power output went to zero, and then record the corresponding serial number!

Jim paying dues on the roof for losing the map!

One module at a time, we covered a portion of the module so that we could detect it’s loss of output, and record that serial number in the proper position.  (The per-microinverter data is not instantaneous, so we had to wait until the Envoy polled each one to detect the change.  Hint to Enphase: it would be nice to be able to get that data in real time, as that would greatly speed up the process!  Maybe as part of a special, troubleshooting-for-idiots mode?)

Nevertheless, with a minimum of fuss and bother, after an hour we had mapped all twenty-six microinverters, without having to unbolt a single module.  Well done, Sara, you more than earned your keep that day!

(Oh, and we now take a picture of the map as soon as it is completed!)

So there you go folks, live and learn!  If anyone out there has faced this problem in the field, how did you resolve it?  We would love to hear from you in the comments below!