The moment of truth came today. The solar installer came out to do the pre inspection test and turned on my new 3 kilowatt rooftop solar panel electric system. After flipping three switches my meter began to spin backward. Awesome! As the air conditioner unit kicked in it began to creep slowly forward and as a cloud passed over back to its usual forward speed. As the cloud passed and the central air turned off the meter resumed spinning backward, reversing my electic bill. I am actually looking forward to my electric bill to see how much of a difference it will make. The system I have is supposed to make about $40 worth of electricity per month and since my bills run around $120 it will give me about a third of my electricity, carbon free. As electricity rates go up the value of the monthly solar will go up.

Getting to this point was a bit of an ordeal. The city that I live in in Texas offers a very generous rebate for solar power systems, over half of the cost. In additon to the city there is a $2000 federal rebate.

The first step was the evaluation by the city. An engineer in an office somewhere simply clicked on Google Earth, looked at a photo of my roof and if it faced the right direction or had any trees shading it. It turned out we were just inside the paramaters for a south to west facing roof and we were approved. Next the solar company sent out an estimator who measured our roof. He mentioned that my shingles were quite loose and that it was quite possible that I would be needing a new roof in a couple of years. I asked what the cost was to come and re-install the system and he told me about two thousand!

I had been wanting a metal roof for some time, for the insurance discount and fire safety as well as energy savings and we decided to go ahead and replace our asphalt shingle roof with a standing seam metal roof at a cost of $8500. The insurance discount would be 20% so we would eventually get our money back but we would not have to worry about the solar panel system having to be removed for another 30 years.

After the roof was installed, a terrible, noisy affair, the solar company came and began installing the panels. Each panel array has six brackets and there are nine panels to each point is a roof penetration. The contractor sealed each roof penetration with a high tech sealant guaranteed to last 20 years so we should not have to worry about leaks.

After the panels were installed they ran conduit down to the electric meter and installed a disconnect box and inverter. They were able to place the inverter, a costly piece of equipment, in the garage, out of the sun. The installation took about one week.

The total cost of the system out of pocket was $5,400, not including the metal roof. I expect to see payback in 8 years or less with rising energy costs. All in all I am very happy so far with the system. It is too bad other cities are not offering similar rebate programs and that the federal government is ending their rebate at the end of 2008. If they were to keep it up it is very likely that the cost of panels would keep going down because of demand.