We get a lot of them in this neighborhood. But this guy was selling solar power. Both my wife and I had talked enough about solar power in the past that we thought, eh, we’ll listen to him. I wasn’t home when he stopped by, so she asked him to come by again in a week.
Now on Friday we’ve got another crew coming to take photos of the roof and take measurements to see about getting us fitted with enough solar panels to take care of about 99% of our electricity needs, on average.
This kind of system will take a load of bread to capitalize, so we’ll be taking out a loan. There are some advantages to this program – the company will pay our bill for the first 18 months, and we can get 30% of the cost back in a federal tax credit program (as long as we remember to roll that money onto the loan, we’re golden).
It’s a 20-year loan, however. That’s not the stunner. The stunner, Michelle says, is that we’ll be in our sixties when we pay it off. IN OUR SIXTIES.
But really, we can have the loan paid off in 12 years, which means ALMOST IN OUR SIXTIES.
We’ll both be little old corporals then. We’ll go in in our puberty and come out in our adultery.
But we won’t have electricity bills to pay. As long as the solar panels last.
Doing the math:
The company, Blue Raven solar, says they can get us a system that’ll meet our current power needs for about $90 a month (plus fees of about $7). Currently, we’re averaging just over $80 a month including fees, so up front it’s not a money-saver. But as we can get the loan paid down, the bill would drop to just the fees, so it’s tempting. And we can do some measures in the house to reduce our consumption and sell electricity to Rocky Mountain Power. Until they decide otherwise. But who knows what’ll happen – they grandfathered in existing solar customers in Utah, while made it a lot less financially feasible for new solar customers to connect to their grid.
We’ll see what they say on Friday.
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