A few months ago I was able to have dinner with one of my three readers (hi Rich!) and he asked me what happened to my solar install. It did not end well (the solar install, not the dinner. The dinner was very nice).

For $REASONS I didn’t write it up as it was happening, but as it is raining while I am typing this I figured I have time to share.

Just to summarize the history of this project, for a very long time I’ve been wanting to install a solar array. It just seems to make sense: for an upfront investment you can get free energy for decades. Plus, to encourage this, the United States government used to give out tax credits for such installations.

Well, the current administration has decided to remove all tax credits for any energy-saving home improvement, and they expired at the end of 2025. Early in that year we decided this was the event we needed to get serious about a solar install.

One thing that kept us from doing it was that most installs are on the roof of your home, and while our home doesn’t immediately need a new roof, it will in the next five to ten years, and we didn’t want to go through the process of getting panels installed just to have to take them down again. I know a really good roofer so that part was easy. Finding a way to finance a new roof and a solar installation was harder, as was scheduling it.

Anyway, as I was doing due diligence on a couple of solar companies I noticed that they all use the same software, which takes a satellite image of your property along with its orientation with respect to the sun, and the solar vendor can just place panels on the image of your roof and calculate what the output and cost will be for that particular configuration. I received a large number of quotes and it was obvious that some companies spent time actually looking at the most efficient layout while others just threw as many panels as they good on the roof and called it a day.

I ended up choosing Southern Energy Management as one of the companies to explore further, and they sent out a salesperson to the house. He was a young, stereotypical “sales bro” but I kind of liked him. He was the one to suggest that instead of a roof install, why not do a ground install instead?

That idea appealed to us a lot. We have a hay field with perfect southern exposure, so we could both maximize the amount of sunlight hitting the panels as well as place it such that we wouldn’t see it unless we purposely looked for it. It would also give us a place to store various agricultural equipment under it if we wanted.

We went ahead and signed the contract, as well as put down a sizable deposit.

Things went smoothly at first, but then it started to go downhill. There was a lot of churn, including our sales guy, and it would often be days before we would get a response to any of our emails (no one would answer if you called). Then we were told “engineering” couldn’t sign off on the install unless we moved the panels much closer to the house, which we weren’t willing to do. There were a lot of other issues that eroded our trust in the company’s ability to deliver, so we cancelled the contract and asked for our deposit back.

There was a lot of drama around that, as well, and the thought that I may have to involve a lawyer kept me from sharing the details. In February we did get our refund, although we were out the money we spent for finding the private utilities as well as our time, but most importantly it was after the tax credits had expired.

Solar energy is just one of those things that makes sense. Heck, the UK even approved plug-in solar panels this week. While the rest of the world is taking advantage of renewable energy, the US is falling way behind.

My assumption is that the government will come to its senses in the near future and reinstate the credits, and when that happens I hope to find an installer that can deliver on our plan.