hey everyone after two years of owning
solar panels i wanted to look back at my
old estimates and my current bills and
determine if it really was worth it
financially to purchase solar panels
and i figured what better place to do
this review than up on my roof with my
solar panels
so before i go into the financials i
want to first talk a little bit about
how i got started and the installation
process
it was about six months after
i purchased my house when salesmen
started to come by and try to pitch me
on the idea
of doing solar because
you know my house is a perfect candidate
for solar and what i mean by that is
that you know all houses aren't
good candidates to have solar because
there might be trees or other you know
objects that block the sun
from your house
but
my house is perfect because as you can
see
you know there's no trees anywhere
blocking the sun
and um
yeah my house is also raised 16 feet off
the ground so here's the frontal view of
my house from the street and the best
part is that you can't see any of those
solar panels the third factor was
you know being environmentally friendly
and you know doing my part to
i guess you know slow global warming
down
so if you look at my roof here you'll
see that i have you know 28 panels up
here
on the big roof and then six panels down
there on the smaller roof
and the number of panels that you have
is directly correlated to how much
energy you produce for you know a given
year
so when the solar panel company comes
out and
does your estimate you typically give
them your bills for the year
and they see how many you know kilowatt
hours your house uses for the year
and then what they do is they
try to match that amount with the output
that they expect your solar panels to
get
so in my case i was using about 12 000
kilowatt hours
for the year
so that's
the amount of solar that they wanted to
generate
for my house and how many panels that
they gave me
okay now let's get into the financial
part of it
so this is my contract with the
installation company called trinity
solar i think they're the biggest in new
jersey
where they were at the time
and this is how much it cost
but i financed through this company
sunova
so i had another another contract with
sonova that you're looking at it right
here
um
it was going to be 18 initial monthly
payments of 180
and 77 cents per month
over 25 years
this beginning in month 19 is
if
an additional payment is not made so by
that initial payment or additional
payment they mean you get a tax credit
from the government for 30
of your total cost
so
after my first year i received a check
from the irs for 12 000
that goes to paying this off which is
really nice so
basically that check just goes directly
to
sanovo
and it keeps my
monthly payment at 180
so you do have to factor that into
your cost and i have that in my
spreadsheet
but what's also nice is that they
you know kind of give you an estimate of
how many kilowatt hours your
system is going to produce and then how
many and then the yearly savings that
you're going to have based on your bills
so i also did this estimate and i'll
pull up my spreadsheet now
all right so here i have my google sheet
and on the left hand side i have my
costs
and then column b is where i have my
predicted which i did initially
now is my actual
so the first cost was just the total
system cost
of the 4120
the six percent interest there's that 30
percent tax credit that i talked about
but what really matters is
all of the
payments that i have to sanovo
so over the course of
25 years i'm making 300 payments of
180 77.
so what that adds up to is this 54 231
so that's really what i'm paying and
then you added in here is just that 30
tax credit which is kind of like free
money so really what i'm paying to
sanovo over the course of the 25 years
is this 66 267.
so that seems
and it is a lot of money
over the course of 25 years so now let's
look at um you know what just
my bill would have been
over that same time period i calculated
that on average my bill was 150
each month
so 150
times 12
is 1800
so that's currently i'm not now i'm not
taking into account what's probably
going to happen as you know energy costs
rise
this will gradually increase as well
over time but i didn't actually take
that into account
so if we take that 1800 and we multiply
it you know times 25
we have 45 000
so
you know what you're probably thinking
is well
you know if you it really would have
only cost you 45 000
um over the course of 25 years and
you're paying
you know this 66 267 or you know without
that
tax credit you're really paying that 54
231 you know there's about you know nine
thousand dollars so it isn't worth it
and yes it wouldn't be worth it if it
wasn't for
these s-rex and s-rex stands for solar
renewable energy certificate so these
solar renewable energy certificates are
basically an incentive for homeowners to
you know have these solar systems
because for every thousand kilowatt
hours
that are produced by your solar system
you can get an s-rack and those s-rex
can then be
sold on an exchange
for you know anywhere from 200 to 300 in
certain states
now why these exist is because
certain states require a certain amount
of their
energy to come from renewable energy
sources
and a lot of the states don't produce
nearly enough
so what they need to do in order to meet
their
requirements
is
buy
solar renewable or any kind of renewable
energy from people who generate it
so i'll bring up this illustration and
says you know sarah has a five kilowatt
solar power system
so she'll generate five s-tracks a year
or you know one s-rec per kilowatt then
she sells them for two hundred dollars
so she earns a thousand dollars you know
selling those five strikes for two
hundred dollars so
she gets that money plus what she saves
on her electric bill
so
i use this company or this exchange
called flat exchange in new jersey
and here you can see the prices that you
can sell your s-trac
depending on which year
or month of generation if you look back
at my spreadsheet here
the state of new jersey when i
signed my contract allowed for
15 years of
you know selling these s-rex since then
i know it's gone back down to to 10 i'm
pretty sure murphy made it 10
our governor
and
yeah this is the average price that i'm
putting in
so i'm generating about 12 and a half
s-racks per year
so if we take that and we multiply 220
times
twelve
point six we get two thousand seven
hundred and seventy dollars a a year
um and you know that's not factoring if
this you know keeps going up like
um we saw in
this graph here you see
2021
and 2020
i'm getting 223 which is nice
so i just put 220 in there just
kind of an average um although it's
probably a little bit generous hopefully
it'll keep going up but you never know
so
the amount of
hysterex over the lifetime
is you know that 15 times that 277
is 41 000. so now
if i take that forty one thousand
and i subtract that fifteen
thousand uh which i calculated before
i'm still getting a
um a net positive of twenty six thousand
dollars so
you know i'm really saving myself
twenty six thousand dollars by going
with solar
and you know it's all because of these
these s-racks if you know these extracts
you know we're in here
it wouldn't even be close to
um
be worth it without the s-rex so
it's definitely a huge factor in
determining whether solar is worth it
for you or not so that wraps it up i
hope you enjoyed and learned something
and if you have a similar experience
please share it in the comments below or
even if it's something different
you want to add
you have a different experience i'd be
very interested in hearing from you
have a good one