For quite some time now, like over a decade, I’ve been wanting to install solar panels. As a physics nerd I’ve always liked the technology (go Einstein) and it just seems cool to generate power from the sun.

Something has always prevented me from pulling the trigger on installing panels. One big thing is that solar technology has been improving so rapidly I didn’t want to buy in just to find out that in two years it is twice a good for the same price.

We moved our farm back in 2023, and while I love where we live now we had spent 24 years making the old place perfect and now we have to start over. One of the things we had at the old house was a whole-house generator for backup power. We were on Duke Energy and when there was a big outage, say due to an ice storm or hurricane, our place was very low on the list of repairs. The longest power outage I can remember was nine days.

Now being on a farm we don’t have city water. In fact the only two services we get are electricity and Internet. If the power goes out we can’t drink, which is kind of important, so even back in 1999 when we first moved out to the old farm I used a portable gasoline generator to provide some electricity. This keeps the refrigerator, freezer, well pump and some lights working, but it won’t run, say, the water heater or heat pump. Having a whole-house generator was awesome, the only downside was the cost and the noise. The best place to put the unit was literally 2 meters from where my head lays on the bedroom pillow, and having what is basically a lawn mower going that close was annoying.

When we moved I had to start over, so I put in a generator cut-out so that my trusty portable generator could power some of the things at the new place. The ultimate goal was to get another whole-house generator, but the first quote we got was 50% more than I paid in 2018. I then got to thinking that instead of a whole-house generator I could get solar and use battery backup for outages. It hasn’t been a priority since our new energy provider, Randolph Electrical Membership Corporation (REMC), is a co-op and they have been amazing. With a much smaller area to cover the longest outage we’ve had in two years was around four hours, but I still want an automatic power backup solution.

Unfortunately, before installing solar panels I wanted a new roof, and we are leaning toward getting a metal roof. A lot of my major purchases are aimed at a 20-30 year lifespan and I don’t want to have to replace the roof anytime soon, especially if it had panels on it. The house also needs painting, and one of the painters I was considering using asked that he get to paint the house before the roof went on, so everything kind of backed up: paint, roof, then panels.

This was until the recent budget bill was passed and solar tax credits are now going away at the end of the year. We had to up our schedule.

I did end up settling on a painter. He’s good, affordable but can’t start for two months due to other jobs. I mentioned the metal roof and he doesn’t care if we go ahead and install it (he used to help his father install metal roofs). I called my roof guy and he is supposed to get back to me, but due to tropical storm Chantal he is kind of backed up as well due to repairs.

In any case it was time to get started on a solar install, so I did what I always do and spent a lot of time doing research. I kept seeing a website called EnergySage pop up and thought it might be a bit scammy, but then Wirecutter also endorsed it so I decided to check it out.

I also reached out to my friends the Old Farts. These are friends of mine in their 70s and 80s who I used to meet for lunch once a week (pre-move and pre-COVID). A surprisingly large number of them have solar, and I was given the names of two companies to contact: Yes Solar and 8MSolar. I also came across one called Renu Energy Solutions and I reached out to them. Plus I set up an EnergySage account.

With EnergySage you answer a few questions and put in your address, and then solar energy companies will send you quotes. I had six companies give me quotes for the install, with one of them being Renu.

You might wonder how they can quote a job remotely, and it is kind of cool. Using your address there is a cloud-based application that will take the satellite picture of your house, figure out the roof line and show the best places to install panels. Then the salesperson can pop solar panels on the roof and calculate the cost of the panels and the expected energy generation. Add in a battery and some inverters and you have a quote.

Here’s what our house looks like in the app:

Of the three installers I contacted, 8MSolar wasn’t interested. They are the number one rated installer in North Carolina according to EnergySage, and we are just outside of their service area. Yes Solar offered to do a consultation over Zoom, and Renu offered to send their sales guy out to meet with us in person.

I took the Yes Solar meeting first, and that’s where I first saw the planning app.

I was a little naive in that I thought I could just put panels on roof to the right of the chimney and be done with it, but there are two issues. First, there are a lot of vents on that part of the roof, in fact it’s the only part of the roof with vents, and you can’t put panels over about a quarter of it. Second, individual panels just don’t generate enough electricity. I was thinking on the order of 15 or so panels but Yes Solar put 40 on the roof. That covered all of the yellow and orange parts on the main house (lighter color is more sun). When we started to provision the battery backup, that is when I realized that battery backup is probably not the best solution for us.

Batteries are expensive and they don’t have enough storage to, say, power the house for a couple of days during an ice storm. We would need two and the second one would cost as much as a generator, so I made the decision to go with a whole-house generator for backup power and just have single battery storage to maximize our ability to meet some of our power needs when the sun wasn’t shining.

We were interested in possibly doing a ground mount install instead of using the roof. Not only would that get rid of any issues with roof leaks or repair, we could optimize placement to get the most energy out of the location as well as start the install immediately. However the Yes Solar guy was pretty adamant that it wasn’t worth the extra cost.

The Renu salesperson came to our house, and he too used the sizing app to talk about options. Since he could see how much property we had, he was the first to bring up doing a ground mount install (which earned him some points with us). That would alleviate so many issues. We also told him about using a Generac whole-house generator for backup, so he suggested a Generac battery backup as well.

When it comes to battery systems, the industry leader is Tesla. The Tesla Powerwall 3 is state of the art, but for $REASONS I am reluctant to give Tesla money. This becomes important a bit later in the story.

After the Renu guy left I spent some time looking at quotes on EnergySage. The highest quote was about twice the lowest quote, and the price was mainly driven by the number of panels. On the most expensive one it was obvious the person just covered the roof with as many as would fit, including two on the little metal roof that covers part of our deck.

We pretty much decided to go with Renu when the Yes Solar guy sent me an e-mail that went something like “We don’t do high pressure sales …” followed up by a high pressure sell. There is a solar rebate available from Duke Energy, but we don’t qualify because we are not (directly) Duke Energy customers and he was warning us to make a decision before it ran out. I had told him this at least three times, and if he couldn’t remember that detail, or didn’t bother to write it down or put it in his customer relationship software, I probably didn’t want his company doing a complex solar install.

To be fair, the Renu guy also constantly forgot that we weren’t on Duke Energy too, but I got mad at him for a different reason.

Since we had decided on a whole-house generator, I wondered if we needed to have solar for the house at all. What if we put in a big array out in the field and just sold it back to REMC? The main issue with that is that REMC will only buy power at wholesale prices, which as a member of the co-op I understand, but they sell it at retail. We would have to generate a lot more power than we consume to make it worthwhile.

Plus, energy prices are only going to go up and I want to use solar as a hedge.

I got angry at the Renu guy over the size of the array in the quote. He had quoted us a 36 panel array but when we were looking at the sell-back option he suggested two, 24 panel arrays. This seemed to indicate that there was some sort of maximize size for a single array, and I was curious as to how close to that we were. I mean, if I can add a couple of more panels for an incremental cost, why not?

It took us four e-mails until I finally got the answer that 36 panels is the largest single array they can do, but it was frustrating. Not sure what the miscommunication was but we’re cool, now.

About a third of the cost for this solution is the battery, and I was researching batteries like those from Tesla, the quoted Generac and another brand Franklin. Franklin has a 15 year warranty compared to 10 years for the other two, but from what I can tell the Powerwall 3 is simply the best option out there. It can deliver a lot of continuous power as well a tremendous amount of peak power, all for less money. Since I just need the battery, mainly, to cover the 30 seconds it takes the generator to start up, I also asked him to quote me for a Powerwall, and it came in at $7,000 less.

There is also a difference in that the Powerwall is pretty self-contained (i.e. locked down). The battery is charged from either grid (mains) power or solar, but not both. The Generac or the Franklin can be charged either from solar or mains power or even an external generator.

This was a concern for me when I was not planning on getting a whole-house generator, since I figured I could use my portable generator if necessary, but mainly driven by cost I held my nose and chose the Powerwall.

Now that we have the contract in place, the fun begins. We will need to run about 265 feet of cable from the array to the garage, and I need to identify where all the pipes are before the trencher gets here. I’ve already pulled the septic field records from the County.

Since signing the contract I’ve worked with both Bob and Emily at Renu and they seem pretty cool. Hoping this project is hassle free but in any case I plan to document it here.

I’m not sure how useful this tale will be to others since folks will need to get busy soon if they want to get an install in before the tax credits expire. We have been told that it could take up to 12 weeks before the system is operational which is the middle of November, so that leaves about six weeks of wiggle room. But I like to think my three readers don’t mind my ramblings (my posts are probably read by people on the toilet) so I plan to write up the whole story.