Just met w/a solar installer--really liked him. I think we're gonna do this.

My main concerns are:
- our roof is 8 years old, and
- if the power goes out, the panels get shut down, so no resilience benefit.

@rpardee The roof should last 25-30 years, so you'll have a good amount of time with the panels before anything needs doing. If the power goes out, you can either install a battery backup ($$$), or just get a generator like everyone else, they are much cheaper. We've not had an issue with either of these, and we just don't get electricity bills anymore. Way cool.

@PoliticalEd @rpardee

and it sounds like battery backups will be coming down in price in the future, even if they are priced out of reach now.

@PoliticalEd @rpardee

plus, I don’t know how it is in your area, you might become a ☀️ ⚡ producer.

@peeppeepcircus @rpardee We are a producer overall. We're in the PNW, where we get 17 hours of sunlight in the summer, so over the course of the year, we far outpace our usage.

@PoliticalEd @peeppeepcircus yup, we're in the Puget Sound area. I'm going to be really interested to see what our production & use looks like.

I gather the net-metering situation here is... in flux. That will also affect the economics of course...

@rpardee @peeppeepcircus We are PUD, and they give us, IIRC, a 6 month average, so if we sell excess in, say, August, we get it credited to us in January. We've only had the charge for the meter connection since installing the panels about 18 months ago. Nothing for electricity.

@PoliticalEd woah, that is awesome. We are $-constrained & so only doing 14 panels for now. Preliminary estimate is that we'd generate 4.3kwh per year with that. I'm not actually sure what our usage is/will be.