5 Mistakes to Avoid When Buying Solar Panels

hi all andy again from solar reviews and today i want to talk about the five tricks to getting the best deal when you buy solar panels and number five buy the solar panels don't lease them when you buy the solar panels you retain the tax credit available rather than the leasing company and also you don't get a lane on your home that becomes a problem when you go to sell your home and really that's the biggest problem with solar leases they're called third party owned solar leases and they can either be at least with a monthly fee or what's called a power purchase agreement where you pay so much per kilowatt hour for the power they produce either way the leasing company retains ownership of them they get the tax credits they you have a lien over your house and so anyone that comes in to buy your home has to sign off and take over your lease contract now most people that want to buy your home people used to like leasing because it was the first zero down financing option that was available for solar panels and so a lot of people signed up for these zero down leases but it has caused lots of problems when people have gone to sell their homes in transferring those leases across it also so happens that many of the companies that favor leasing as their model are probably some of the solar companies that tend to be very large national solar companies that some of the companies i would probably least like to personally deal deal with and it's fun funnily enough two guys that work at solar reviews lockheed evan they both bought houses that had uh solar panels on them that were part of leases and both of them were very dissatisfied with the outcome at one point i think like i won't mention the companies so it doesn't matter but at one point lockheed had a string down on his system for like six or eight weeks and couldn't get anybody to do anything about it in the other case evan wanted to vary his system and that he was quoted a ridiculous amount of money to do it like probably three times more than what that system's actually worth to buy today so it's leasing not my favorite option buying is great if you don't have the money up front that's fine there are a million solar loan products with a solar loan product you buy the panels off the installer and the job off the installer and you just pay the loan back the beauty of that is there's much more flexible loan terms available there's short term loans if you want to pay it back over only a few years there's longer term ones if you want to pay it over five 10 15 there's even 20 year loans in the market so and some really good solar loan providers mosaic solar sunlight yeah quite a few and also home equity line of lines of credit available now the second thing is find a local installer the reason being is that on our site there's many many tens of thousands of reviews of solar companies typically we find the local installer having a much better review score than large corporates or national corporates so we're not talking the very small solar companies so we tend to say that you should ensure that they've been in business for five years uh check their licensing and insurance certainly you can use the contract to check website in your state to check that they're licensed and you know look for ones with good reviews and i would also look for a company that employs their own install crews i think that's really quite important so look for a local company in business five years probably ideally i would say between 15 and say 100 employees in that sort of range size beyond that it gets very very hard to deal with customer service so that's why i think that sort of company tends to have a better reputation the third tip to getting the best deal when buying solar panels is stick with the top 10 brands of solar panels there's really no need to go outside those and the reason i say that is because within those top 10 there's panels that are very very good like sun power and lg rex solar panasonic say that are more expensive you know but are very good and there's also within that top ten there are also very very good tier one chinese made mainly chinese-made panels brands like longy solar trina canadian solar which despite the names actually mainly a chinese manufacturer jinko solar ja solar companies like that so if you stick with those 10 brands and if you google uh just best brands of solar panels you'll find our website solarreviews.com if you look on our youtube channel you'll see that we've made videos on most of those brands uh about it so there's really no need even if you're a very value conscious shopper and are really wanting to prioritize low cost over other things then even in that top 10 you can find a solution that that works and all of those companies are quite bankable and that's what you really lose when you go to a second or third tier manufacturer you lose the bank ability that that car company will be around to support you over the 25 year life so stick to the top 10 brands in terms of inverters you won't be offered a lot of choice they're a rapid shutdown rules that mean that usually residential systems have to be either micro inverters or optimizers so you really only have tego m phase and solar edge really is your options and i wouldn't really go outside probably those three if you are able to use a string inverter if it's a ground mount or something like that and my preference would be to use a string inverter less electronics usually means less faults on a job than you know fronius or sma would be my choice the second most important tip for getting when it really comes down to it for getting a good deal is to take advantage of knowing the way solar jobs are financed and what that is is that's to go to your local solar company and ask for a price which includes a loan option so they'll give you a price for the system and they'll say and here's a loan for it from xyz finance company what you then do is you say all right i know that in that loan your finance provider is charging you what's called an origination fee or a dealer fee um it's sometimes referred to of around 10 now the better the loan terms are the higher that origination fee so if you let's say it's a really good it's a 20-year 2 loan which is probably about the best i've ever seen you know for for a solar load it's not really economic for a finance company to offer that to you and the reason they do offer that to you is probably in that case the dealer the solar company itself is probably giving maybe up to in that case 20 or 25 of the job fee to the finance company up front for them to finance on such low terms so if it's a more normal loan you know like a 10 year sort of 4.9 sort of loan something like that then that dealer fee might be six or eight like six or eight percent now those dealer fees are never really discussed and i don't really understand why solar companies aren't just honest with customers and say well we yeah we have to pay dealer fees that's why you get such good finance i think they just want all the jobs to go through and they don't want to raise objections or anything that will annoy customers but you know i think most customers are probably sophisticated enough to understand that if they're getting offered money cheaper than at home loan rates somebody must be paying the fiddler so you know what i would do is then go back to them and say look i'll pay cash or i'll sort out my own finance but i know there's a dealer fee in that and whether that dealer fee be 8 10 12 i would ask them to take off the dealer fee because they were going to give that money to the finance company anyway so that's a a trick um you know sometimes you can save yourself you know 10 on the cost of a system and my final most important tip to ensuring you buy solar panels or the best system the best solar panels and become a happy solar customer over a long time is do not take the cheapest quote the cheapest quote will nine times out of ten either be on inferior gear or it's a solar company that basically takes the attitude i'm gonna come into the market and i've seen hundreds of these do this and then disappear two three four years later i'm going to come into the market because solar jobs a big ticket they're quite a lot of money and compared to some other home services there's probably more margin in solar still than what there are in other things so i'm going to come into the market i'm going to sell heaps of job i'm going to grab that margin and then i'm going to wind up my business three years later and start a different one so what you really want more than a cheap price and keep in mind the tax credit's paying for a chunk of your system anyway so you know whatever savings you make by buying a cheap one you're only hanging on to 20 74 of that saving you know 26 you're just getting less tax credits so um you really want a company that will support you you will need service from your solar company over the life of it and if you're with the wrong side of company there are definitely solar companies out there whose whole business model is to get in quick sell jobs you get the margin up front you your real cost in doing a solar job as a company is obviously you have to buy the equipment you have to fund the installation process and the permitting and the inspections and all that sort of stuff but then you've also got to provide service over 25 years there are a whole heap of solar companies that just ignore that last bit they're not even intending to they're gonna um you know they're going to get in sell a heap of jobs and wind up and so that's why i'm saying don't go with the cheapest quote you may be fine having said that you know like i can't no there's no certainties in life there may be some guys out there who are really really good very very efficient have a very low cost operation and they can be below that 260 watt sort of mark on price and still be a good viable business however one the cheaper you get the more likely it is that they're just trying to make a margin now and ignore the 25-year support obligation they're taking on by selling you a job so that's my number one tip good luck with it if you want to investigate the economics of solar and you haven't already done so then head on over to solarviews.com solar dash calculator it's a completely open solar estimator from just the amount you spend on your last month's bill it can tell you how many panels you need how much power they'll produce what the system will likely cost based on the average of local prices for solar systems of that size uh it'll show you your solar production over the course of a day and over the course of a year and it'll also actually model your electricity usage it's very clever that it can do that from just knowing your most recent month's bill it can actually model your electricity use both over the course of a day and also the course of a year so that'll basically give you all the economics of solar you can play around within the assumptions on that calculator about what you think utility price inflation might be in the future because that affects savings a lot and oh and quite a number of other things you can play with there if the economic stacks up where you live and for your power use of your home then you can also request quotes from local solar companies through that really that's where solar reviews comes in we've developed a rating system for solar companies our solar reviews expert rating score and when we put you in touch with solar companies we look for those same things that i've talked about you know local right size employ their own installation crews and wherever possible we connect you with the good guys in solar and really that's what i want solar reviews to be known for and that's what i'm proud of that we've created an ecosystem of seven or eight hundred solar companies that really do meet most of the criteria or in most cases all of the criteria of what we think makes a good solar company so good luck to you all and we'll see you next time

Channel: SolarReviews

Views: 117,420

Keywords: solar panels, buy solar panels, where to buy solar panels, are solar panels worth it, solar tips, solar tips and tricks, is solar worth it in 2021, is solar worth it, solar mistakes, solar energy, solar panels for home, solar panels for beginners, solar panels worth it, solar installation mistakes, solar 101, top 5 solar mistakes, solar panels for home 2021, solar power, solar, buying solar panels for home, buy solar, buying solar, solar for beginners

Id: JudI2-nKKUc

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021