Buying Solar Panels
Sunday, December 12, 2010: Updated February 20, 2016
Buying Solar Panels
As luck would have it, the day before I bought our solar system, the 25% rebate offered by the state of Utah was discontinued. Ah crap! Too late now, I'm committed regardless.
Above is a picture of my order (that Utah Solar took in Nov 2010) before being loaded on the truck in California and to shipped to my house in Utah.
I took out a $22,800 home equity loan for the panels but initially paid using credit cards. If you get 1% cash back on all purchases and pay off the balance before the due date, why not? That knocked off $214.65, more than enough to buy a remote power monitoring hardware/software and Internet gateway package. It's called TED5000. Cool! Snort snort.
Here it is being unloaded at my house.
For our anniversary, I told my wife I was buying something beautiful, expensive and that sparkles in the sunlight. For some reason she was not as excited as I was when it arrived on the truck.
Update: 3/7/2013
You can now buy an entire 5kW solar system (panels, racking, inverters) from Utah Solar aka Solar Home for just over $8000. This is before tax credits and utility rebates. Your actual out-of pocket expense for all this equipment will be much, much less.
This is now pretty common pricing across the solar wholesaler industry, (materials only).