Going Solar in 2021? WATCH This First! - LIVE

hey guys welcome back to a special episode of tiba davinci live this week we're talking about going solar in 2021 and everything you need to know and i'm joined by my very good friends senue from drone quote hey anyway how's it going man hey there ricky thanks for having me i appreciate it absolutely so if you guys have seen the channel before you know we've done a lot of work with quran quote when when i first met senua i was super excited to hear about how he how he approaches solar quoting so they drive they fly a drone they do all the legwork kind of for you and they talk to installers in your area and get you multiple quotes without any of the sales high pressure sales people or anything else and i don't even know if you have the number in front of you but dozens of our viewers have gone solar using drone quote so thank you for being here we really appreciate you and i'm hoping to just get into the comments and answer everyone's questions and figure out what people are thinking what questions they have about solar what's changed and uh and take it from there yeah i'm excited you know there's been quite a few developments in the solar industry uh especially at the end of last year um with the tax credit being one of the bigger ones uh but you know we'll get into more details as the conversation uh goes through absolutely and um as always this uh video is presented by jetta which is one of our partners here and if you have a tesla you're gonna love their products they feel like tesla made it themselves really high quality products good uh good really cool stuff so go to getjetta.com if you use our kotuba davinci you'll save a couple of bucks as well on checkout they've got really awesome the newest product they have is the jetta tray which helps you to like charge your watch and airpods other wireless stuff as you're driving so really cool stuff definitely check them out and thank you jetta for sponsoring the show all right so i think we can probably jump right into it and you you just mentioned the big thing that i actually i'm not even 100 sure on so let's talk about it what has changed in terms of the tax credit this year what was like what was the original plan and what's like what's changed yeah so the original plan was to decrease the tax credit from 26 in 2020 to 22 in 2021 and then eventually it'll go down to well from 22 it'll eventually go down to zero for for residential tax credits uh but that was extended at the end of last year and i signed into into reality or i guess law or what have you when they did the first or the second stimulus back in early january and that would made it concrete for until 2023 gotcha so now kind of what is you guys you guys do a lot of solar work and 2020 was a pretty wild year with with coveted 19. so what was your year like last year by the way i'm just kind of curious and i don't think i've actually asked you that no you you haven't actually well not not in a lot of detail we did when the pandemic started you know happening and everybody started realizing how serious it was this was what like february march time frame that's when everything shut down we saw a significant drop off in business it was from one week to the next like people that were ready to go were telling us hey we're going to hold off and installers were telling us hey we anticipate shortages and panels and longer lead times as a result of that it was a harrowing you know a couple of weeks for us because i mean for everybody really not just us um and i think that an unforeseen result of that is that people were were home naturally because they had to be right but people started using way more electricity as a result of that not thinking that that would happen and those people that were telling us they were going to wait started getting their bills and then they started thinking themselves hey i'm going to be working from home more often or i'll be schooling from home and i think now more than ever as that my bill utility bills increased as a result of you know more hours home let's look into this you know with a renewed sense of urgency it was it was a pretty wild time though i yeah it wasn't my cup of tea yeah i can imagine i do know a lot of people did still go solar and i think part of it is the uncertainty the the emergency preparedness aspect of it you know we just went through that entire um craziness in texas where they had power outages for days at a time in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record and so i think people are thinking about backup energy so it's not just like how do i save money on my bills which those people might have kind of maybe slowed down in 2020 with everything happening but there are people who are thinking just in case something happens like i want to be able to still be real yeah so absolutely we'll we'll kind of jump to and fro i think um because otherwise we're not going to keep track of all the questions the first question and i'm going to ask write to you jason steppen says first question 10 cents per kilowatt hour is what he pays with no peak time of use i'm very jealous of his electricity prices he says is it worth it to have two power walls or just one well i mean i would ask if i were on the phone with jason i would ask him what his motives are you know i would imagine that his motives have something to do along with what we just mentioned uh but jason i think that you know if you're looking to save money you're going to have to have the expectation that the savings are going to take over a longer course of time than they would otherwise for ricky for example where his cost of your average cost of power is probably about 32 cents a kilowatt hour right ricky yeah and come summertime the 4 to 9 pm jumps up to like 58 cents dude i'm not making that up no no no i know i know that's we get a lot of our customers from the southern california region especially uh san diego thank you sdg e by the way but uh jason going back to your question you know if you have one power wall you're not avoiding any costs right you don't have any demand charges as ricky just mentioned and your cost per kilowatt hour is extremely low so i mean unless you have a significant need for backup power in the event of an emergency i i mean if i were in your shoes i'd probably you know err on the side of caution and go with one battery yeah if you have like air conditioning or a double oven or some high use utility that they told you one power wall can't provide and you want to like your your total goal is backup power two power walls will you know give you 24 kilowatt hours and or 26 and it'll it'll cover your cover your usage really well but that's going to cost you it'll probably be about 20 000 to do that so that would be kind of up to you but as far as like yeah it's not going to be a cost-saving win because your electricity is just so affordable that it's um it's crazy and no time of use that's crazy it's hard for californians to imagine i guess but yeah that's right you know what let me add something to a it's a little technical thing here but the depth of discharge doesn't mean means that you won't actually get 26 kilowatt hours uh you'll probably get somewhere i want to say it's uh 11 kilowatts if i remember correctly i could be wrong on that number but you'll have a little bit less in the capacity the rated capacity of the battery just for the sake of the chemistry and you know keeping the battery functional in the future right so keeping keeping in this uh in this vein right now how tesla announced their their solar pricing and i believe it was with the tax credit of 1.49 per watt right um let's talk a little bit about tesla um how how do you how do you feel their prices are and what have people been saying about going with tesla for solar versus other companies and other installers because there are still tons of other companies that that do solar there are yeah um so you know i appreciate you bringing that up early on in the conversation i like to do that when our sales people speak with you know homeowners we bring it up early on because it's important to understand what somebody feels about tesla or how they feel about it or you know what they plan on on installing and why i mean they're the elephant in the room right and tesla's pricing is absolutely the lowest possible price you could find in the market what i tell people when they're buying solar is that you're not the same panels that tesla is installing are the same panels that any other installer is installing and right now or as of late it was the qcell 340 the black on black cue cell 340 great panel by the way i love it i would install on my own home the thing is that when you choose an installer you're choosing an installer to do the work and who you will hold accountable in the future in the event of there being some unforeseen blank right and you want to be able to call that installer and have somebody pick up the phone and not treat you like a number and or even pick up the phone so what that means for you is that a company like tesla being as big as they are the likelihood that you're going to get the kind of service that you would get from your your local company is low you're going to get a different level of service and you're at the whims of you know what the company's doing at the time where they're focusing their energy what they're trying to do with their business rather than a local installer that is focused solely on solar so i tell people don't worry about i mean worry about the components they're important but understand that when you're buying solar you're buying a relationship with the company that's installing it because the company that manufactured the panels will you know honor their warranty but there's got to be somebody going out there first to do the warranty uh inspection or or functionality test to make sure that the system's still under warranty and that's who you who you want to treat you with the level of service that you want to be treated with so i speak to that to homeowners often yeah i so i i get emails from a lot of people who've gone all the different various rats so i have a pretty interesting perspective on this i will say some people have had a fantastic experience with tesla and they've had no issues at all i think the thing is tesla is growing at such an incredible speed like they're going from a car company to a nationwide solar installer and think about what that means as far as like training people and like infrastructure and the the service crews and all of it so there's gonna be some growing pains early on i think and you have to potentially like if you're living in a city like if you live in san diego odds are tesla has tons of people and they've been doing it for a long time but if you're in a new market that they're just entering there might be some hiccups and stuff uh thank you eric kessler for the super chat and thank you for becoming an even more valued member of the youtube channel partnership program so eric uh eric is my personal hero he's one of our awesome supporters so um i will say though here's one thing to think about when you go with a big company like tesla is i think i told you this my solar panels by the way are turning 10 years old my first five solar panels i bought turned 10 in june of this year so first of all i want to make a video and talk about that i think it's just super cool in 10 years my i've gone to two refrigerators three cars five laptops like 10 cell phones right but my solar panels are just up there just rocking away never had a issue um part of why i want to make this video why i love it so much is people do not understand how long like how durable a solar panel is absolutely but i will say this my company that installed it was this company called all seasons uh roofing and solar or something is out of business so if something did go wrong they wouldn't i couldn't call on them okay number two the panels are made by a company called silicon if you remember back in the day it was like s-i-l-i-k-e-n out of business so if something were to happen i'm sol because i cannot call the panel maker or the installer now when people talk about oh i have a 30-year warranty with solar that sounds good but if you really if like 10 years go by in 10 years now i'll tell you 10 years of my life have gone by very quickly if that when that happens will the installer be there to to honor their warranty that's where i think you gotta you know you gotta kind of weigh the pros and cons and solar is really cutthroat and competitive and i think the next 10 years is going to be even more so so there's gonna be like consolidation and stuff um you have to weigh all that out it's like the price today it's the service today it's the longevity and so that's where like if you were curious about something email someone like senui and ask them hey i want to get panels that like ricky said i don't want to have that problem or 10 years from now they're out of business so which ones do you recommend like i would go like if you got lg panels i'm pretty sure lg is going to be around in 30 years so yeah i would say same thing about lg you know i mentioned qcell a moment ago qcell is a wonderful manufacturer panels you know their sun power although sunpower had a little bit of a of a change in their business model where they went from being a panel manufacturer to not being a sales company that sells sunpower panels you know there's uh a boutique installer maybe they don't like that i just said that but uh solaria uh is a wonderful installer they they're a little bit on the smaller side and it'll lend itself an install like that i'm sorry not installer i meant to say uh manufacturer a manufacturer like that will lend itself to the liability that they may not be around 10 years from now as ricky just mentioned so i really like to stick to the bigger companies and sometimes these bigger companies to you know the everyday person out there looking for solar are companies they've never heard of because it's not like you're looking for solar on a regular basis everybody knows their iphone right everybody knows you know lg and so on and so on but these companies like jinko and canadian solar and qcell for that matter are huge huge companies that make excellent products they're just not a name brand because we don't look for solar on a daily basis part of it too is like you could never 100 guarantee anything like you never know how the how the you know which companies will win out and how things will change and stuff so yeah part of it is and this is true for anything right if you buy a refrigerator and has a 10-year warranty who's to say that that company's still around so these are the interesting kinds of kinds of questions that i think come up so i wanted to ask you a question that eric kessler asked he says my next home will be hybrid off-grid with tesla solar roof for the aesthetics power walls he says what must be designed in to be able to survive like a texas-sized two to three week or longer utility outage well i mean in terms of surviving some kind of outers like that you have to design in the capacity for what you're installing in your home so you know are you installing a hot tub a huge refrigerator uh you know you have a well you probably won't charge your your electric vehicle with your power wall but any other uh high energy use appliances or electronics you'll have to factor for how many kilowatt hours you plan on using on a regular on a daily basis and what that would look like if you had no power coming in from the infrastructure of the utility right so how much power are you storing in your batteries or battery if it's singular and how are you going to divvy that up along the appliances or the the breakers that are going to be fed by those batteries so it's just a matter of sitting down with your home builder if you're building a new home and discussing you know what your plans for the home are and what you would like to have in the event of an emergency yeah we i talked a little bit about this uh on our vice versa show but what happened to texas i think it shows you the importance of having like a lot of options for example i'm i'm a fan of having natural gas running to each to homes not i mean not i don't use it a whole lot but i have it so if something were to happen i have natural gas and the reason why that's so cool is if you have a power wall to run a little 500 watt blower my power wall could run a blower for like 20 hours i could use natural gas and heat my house whereas if you don't have a power wall you don't have electricity then even with natural gas you can do anything unless you have like a natural gas fireplace which would help in some areas but i mean the first thing i think is just try to make a house resilient have a lot of backup options out there and the second thing is the minute you have any kind of an emergency situation you got to kind of re-tune the way you think you got to go take a low power mode shut down turn off breakers like shut down anything you don't absolutely need maybe your whole family kind of moves into one or two rooms and you kind of keep those rooms only you you know watched everyone watch tv together just do whatever you can to like lower um your utility usage also um eric you're gonna i'm i'm curious when eric is gonna have to send me a message when he gets his a solar glass roof uh wildly jealous i love that thing it's one of those products i wish my house it just doesn't make sense for me because i have a new roof even as like snow is accumulating if the sun is out it'll just kind of melt it off as it goes compared to like more of an insulative thing like a tile roof so for that reason your roof will shed the snow better but the first and the first thing to do is get up and make sure make sure the roof is clear because you want to collect as much sun as possible and on a cold winter day you're not going to get that much maybe it's kind of more kind of you know lower lower in the sky sun that's not quite ideal but just collect as much as you can to charge your power walls lower your usage um i actually kind of want to do a video where i do like a one week challenge and i say like i'm going to try to live off my power wall for a week my wife said do it when the sun is when like the more the sunny weather because i really i cloudy days really do make it much more difficult so yeah that would be actually that's a really good idea that would be a really interesting video and so going with the solar glass roof or any kind of solar first and foremost keep them clear especially when the when the uh when the when the uh the temperatures are cold and there's potentially snow and stuff that way you get as much collection as possible charge your batteries lower usage and try to just endure um exactly so um so samurai tell me a little bit about um what are the questions that you get what are like the top two or three questions you get asked most from people who are trying to go solar you know i think one of the top questions i get is the inverter the kind of inverter that's being selected and there's a lot of hype around different kinds of inverters right and really the the panel type and or the method of acquisition if it's not cash if it's a cash purchase it's very straightforward you know those are very i don't want to say easy but they're a lot less complicated if you have a finance option versus a ppa or power purchase agreement you know people go back and forth between what's better versus a purchase with finance or a ppa it really you know it really depends on the individual what is going to be better whether it's a panel the inverter or the method of acquisition and i think that the reason why the inverter question is so common is because for the most part there's for the most part there's really only there are more than two but the more common inverters in the industry are solar edge and end phase and ricky as long as you've known me you've heard me talk about those so excuse me those two options so i think that being the case people are that are more technical will learn dig more into those two options and have a lot of questions behind them and then there's also the like i mentioned the panel question which depending on the company that you're talking to if it's not tesla a lot of solar companies will stick to one company one solar panel manufacturer over another uh and they do this for various reasons re usually it's because if i buy more of one kind i get a better price in in greater numbers right so the panel uh type and inverter are very common questions like i mentioned uh the method of acquisition you know i prefer to suggest to people that they purchase their system whether it's a finance option or a cash option just because it removes so many of the strings that are attached to anything that's power purchase agreement type of acquisition um so yeah those those three questions are very common amongst our clientele yeah my my brother recently just bought a house and the house that he bought had a lease agreement solar with it and it was a it took it added like i think two weeks to the escrow and what it came down to is the if if you um and i'm not saying it's a bad option if you have a house and you're really on a position to be buying solar and getting a lease which means now you have solar and you're making green energy and saving some some money never a bad idea if that's if that's where you want to go but one thing to keep in mind is it does add like a lien to your property so this this company the house that he was buying this company had a lien against it saying hey we have we own property on your on your um on your roof and your property and so when it came down to selling the house they had to square up that contract saying hey what are you going to do you know are you going to pay pay us out or what do you know how you going to take care of that so my brother and the selling person had to like negotiate that into the contract and it took added two weeks to escrow it's not impossible it's not you know but it is something to consider uh that there's a lien on your property which i'm not a fan of that yeah you know one thing that i'll share with you uh regarding the ppa the power purchase agreement and the purchase whether it's well in this case in this example a finance purchase the reason why a ppa is nice is because you don't have to worry about the complexities of the tax credit right but nowadays ppas are 25 years long for the most part so you bind yourself to a 25-year commitment that usually has an escalator of 2.9 so you start at a low 17 18 cents a kilowatt hour and then every year goes up three percent it's a compounding three percent by the way in my book that's not a good deal now granted yeah you know i'm only one man uh in my opinion a purchase option financed over 20 years uh that's built for you to keep the tax credit as opposed to applying it to the principal to bring down your monthly payment will be far more attractive without having to commit yourself for 20 years excuse me 25 years you're commit make committing for 20 years so still a long period of time however the buyout clause is so much simpler you have the remaining principle and that's it no prepayment penalty and you still have 15 cents per kilowatt hour without there being any escalators so now granted everything i just said would lead you to believe that i am biased towards a purchase option and i am so for a lot of those reasons yeah but when you talk to a company bring up those questions and get all the numbers in front of you that's what i always say like first and foremost have numbers that way you can make your make your decision um so okay that's good somebody in the um in the live chat named junker zien mentioned he has panels that are 15 years old and they're still working what kind of panels are they yeah i'm i'm curious uh uh junker if you can let us know what what kind of panels they were i'd be i'm really curious as well but the fact is my yeah my panels were silicon which is some kind of startup company i guess and 10 years later they they still look fine and they're still performing really well and interestingly as well once you have like the roof mounting that's the hard part to me um i recently don't know if i told you but the panels that we you helped us install last year i upgraded them to 350 watt panels this year i did it in a day i i went up there under the screws took each panel down i mean i'm not trying to make it sound like it's easy these are pretty heavy and i have juan help me but yeah i i took all 12 down and i swapped them in with higher panels and they're making like 30 more electricity than they did before which is kind of cool and it took me like a day to do the hard part really is on the roof so even if something did happen to your solar panel itself it's not the end of the world really it's pretty cost effective to be able to change that i mean if you have like a 10 story building or something that might be different but you get my point you know what actually that's a really good point that you're making right now i want to pause there for a moment and i elaborate if i may um oftentimes you know people will tell me you know ask you know what's it like if i want to add panels can i just buy like 15 panels now and then add two more in the future and i'm gonna take your point that you made and include into what i'm saying here because it is easy to add two panels to any house right you added i think you had a ten panels uh in 20 20 12. uh and it was i mean it was easy done in the sense that you know easily done in the sense that your roof was very simple to work with uh but oftentimes i tell people you know five years from now instead of adding two more panels to meet your needs of what you're using two years from now replace x amount of panels with higher wattage panels which is going to be far less complicated you don't have to make additional penetrations into the roof you could typically use the existing infrastructure that was installed with the previous system and it'll cost you less and you'll you can even do it yourself in most cases assuming it's not a dangerous roof really good point you brought up there's there's complexities there i'm not recommending you guys do anything you're not comfortable doing but exactly that's what i recently did and i i didn't really make a video about it but it's it's fascinating to watch how much production i'm making so i'm almost uh june will be my my best month in terms of production but i have a about a 5 kilowatt system and right now yesterday i made 35 kilowatt hours which is like a record high for me and i think by june i'm hoping to break 40. and i actually have a few more panels that i actually potentially looked at getting installed i just haven't had time yet but um there's something about solar for me that's just wildly fascinating i've always said this it's not really even 10 years ago when i first met with my installer they were like oh show me your bill because they're trying to sell you they're trying to you know show you like here's the savings they saw my bill back then i was a bachelor i was living by myself it didn't really you know san diego doesn't get very hot it doesn't get very cold my bill was really cheap to begin with and he goes oh wow your bill is so low you know probably not worth it i was like no no i want solar like to be able to do this today i wanted solar so i could talk about it 10 years later and and figure out like what goes into it do you need to clean all this stuff are they long-lasting is there any maintenance and i have all the answers like zero my panels will cost me zero in ten years and i get up i get up personally and clean them like once or twice a year even that you don't have to the rains come and stuff and you don't have to worry too much about it but um but yeah they are a wildly fascinating thing and i have this little meter on my on my wall that i watch it's an ipad and it shows me my my generation and so now that i have a power wall what it does is it charges during the day and then as soon as my power wall is topped off then it exports it to the grid and you can kind of see that happen in real time but i'm pretty much at 100 i'm offsetting my entire day and i have my power wall program to only discharge during the really expensive period from four to nine pm yeah so it charges up and then it sits idly by and then from four to nine pm like as far as my utility company is concerned like i'm i'm not in the house because my usage is zero it just completely covers my house yeah yeah uh you know the the powerwall comes in really handy when you have demand charges yeah or you have a time of use rate because you could avoid those those higher utility rates that they're gonna you know beat you down with and they're high and we're just talking about it in in california or in san diego it is in the 50 cents you said earlier yeah yeah exactly i'll just read in the comments so rui asked does do the old panels get a second life i actually the panels that i put it last year i experimented with some used panels absolutely um use panels the the really weird thing too even after 30 years my prediction is that they're going to produce 80 or 70 percent of what they used to when they were new but you could put them somewhere and still continue to use them but really imagine how much cheaper they're going to be in 30 years right oh absolutely so i think what's going to end up happening is like if you've got huge amounts of land just throw in more panels and make more electricity but really the key will have to be that our storage can keep up one thing i've mentioned to you in the past is we we here in california like around high noon we make so much solar power that we actually curtail it which is just waste the solar generation because there's nowhere else there's nowhere to put it you know grids are very much like just in time whatever power is needed right now that's what is needed and when you have all these houses with solar at high noon there's no demand for it and so that energy is literally wasted so people who are getting solar today have to remember is if you live in a place where there's a lot of people with solar you really should try to store that into a battery and and eventually have it i think solar was really big in the last 10 years i think 2021 to 2031 is going to be the decade of battery storage if if all of us could have more battery storage that's how we really help like clean up the grid yeah you know let me add that a little bit by saying that uh you know as the number of people installing solar has increased in 2019 was a very strong year 2020 was a strong year as well even though the pandemic you know hit at the end of 2020 there was a significant surge as people were trying to capture the tax credit before these news of the tax credit being extended came out but to your point of a lot of people having solar and not too many people having batteries i want everybody to know that adding a battery or a solar system is extremely easy you know we do it on almost regular basis where somebody's calling us asking us to put together a battery quote for them and then take it all the way to installation ricky you installed the battery long after your system was installed originally so it's just a matter of you know finding the right equipment out there because there are different options other than tesla uh there's lg chem they're coming out with a 16 kilowatt hour battery uh battery there's a generac yeah it's um uh actually our mutual friend um oh my goodness lives in texas robert robert thank you he uh was mentioning uh that to me the other day uh about acquiring one for his home but they're coming out with that battery later this year and then there's a generac the gener the generator manufacturer they install that or they manufacture batteries as well they have a 22 kilowatt hour battery capacity uh and there's a few others out there and you know we're talking right now about uh lithium ion batteries but there's also lithium phosphate batteries which have a greater depth of discharge and they're a lot more stable in the chemistry and they last longer they're a little bit bigger but you know you put it in your garage and you hide it somewhere so there's a lot of technology that's being deployed and advanced as we speak so i think that as you mentioned earlier you know 10 years from now if we all not all but as many people as possible adopt energy storage it will definitely curtail um the amount of other forms of electricity that are being generated and moved around because the energy's already stored in people's homes yeah that's the first and first best step you can take and lithium iron phosphate is wildly exciting to me because unlike lithium like the more high energy density when you need more advanced really like hardcore chemistries you need things like nickel and manganese and other more rare earth metals lithium iron phosphate wildly abundant very very economically very eco-friendly and yeah some of these battery systems have three to four thousand cycle lives which means you could you could use your system forever and if you keep it within the sweet spot it might even be further than that it might be like a 20-year house battery and if in your house like you mentioned the the size doesn't really matter all that much i had a really good question i wanted to to tackle from ian sears who says solar trackers on pole mounts versus fixed ground mount and roof mount costs and effectiveness so the cheapest is probably uh ground mount right um i'm actually not a huge fan of ground mount because i think like the earth should be used for something a lot there's no there's no greater uh feeling for me than having a solar on a roof because you're literally not there's no compromise to it in fact you're keeping your house cooler by not having that radiant sun energy hit your roof and heat up your attic so that's right that's my favorite way to do it and what's really crazy is 10 15 years ago i remember when i first got my system my prices were over three three and a half almost four times more expensive than they are today so at that point uh like um a tracking system might have been beneficial but today solar panels are so cheap just buy more solar panels and stick them down there's no maintenance you don't have to grease bearings and all the kind of mechanical complexities of the amount of a tracking mount system i think as solo gets cheaper there's just no need for it you're far better off just put some panels south facing put a couple of west face like you could just have them static and they're so cheap that it's probably better long term than having moving moving parts well i've installed not too many a handful of tracking systems and the concept of a tracking system is actually really cool because you increase your efficiency of whatever kind of panel you're talking about by about 30 to 40 percent now that comes at a cost and that cost can sometimes be that if you are moving your system and it gets stuck in a certain way that's not optimal you just missed out on half of the day potentially in terms of production not to mention the issue with moving parts as you mentioned the tracking system the last tracking system i installed was several years ago our partners right now don't do tracking systems but i want to say it was in 2015 2016 and i found out last year that that tracking system was eventually decommissioned uh because there was a lot of issues with the motorized elements yeah i think i don't think people will even make them in a couple years the just the the economics don't make make sense anymore when a panel cost two thousand dollars it made a lot of sense but when they cost a hundred or two hundred dollars like they do now i just don't think you could you could um you could use them and for it to make sense so you mentioned that there's a couple of other battery uh providers that's really exciting do you have any pricing on the lg cam battery no i haven't had any partners release it yet um the lg cam battery the previous one the uh resu residue um i want to say it was a 10 10 kilowatt battery it was marginally less expensive than the tesla power wall and it didn't have the software features that tesla has so it wasn't as popular as a result of the capacity and the cost and not to mention the the software behind tesla's powerwall i mean i got to give it to tesla their their software's just immaculate it's wonderful but i don't have any pricing to answer your question got it yeah the the integration with tesla is fantastic all their little charting and graphing is really nice and when you install a powerwall you get a gateway and they'll put leads on your main breaker and and your solar part and so you get a full breakdown of like what are you pulling from the grid what's your solar doing what's your battery doing and you can lay them all over each other it just wildly again just if you're a nerd and you love this kind of data you're it's just a really fun like every night i i open my app and i go alright how's my generation today and i try that's why i knew how much i made yesterday is because i'm tracking it um if you if you just want to save money and you don't care that's a different uh reason to get it but well i will mention you just brought up a point uh the leads they're they're called uh ct uh geez i just dumped myself here um there there are these leads that go around the cables at your service panel and as you mentioned they measure the electricity coming in and out of your home you don't have to install a tesla power wall to have those there's a product that i've seen people install and it's a great product and it gives you this kind of data even if you don't have solar it's called sense home sense if i want to if i'm not mistaken and it'll give you very similar data down to the signature yeah down to the signature of like your fridge going on or turning off and it recognizes those things with their own electric signature and it'll tell you what is going turning on in your home and how much electricity is using in real time so for those people out there that you know potentially solar may not be a good fit or they don't have the roof space or what have you sense is a great product and by the way nobody told us to mention anything about sense it's just perfect opportunity to bring it up because it is a great product yeah um i know some people who have it i've thought about getting it i have a more custom system that i being a developer i have all this like python and stuff running so i went with a different system but their their product is really cool i think it's about 400 bucks and what's really cool about it is yeah the install is pretty simple you go to your main me your breaker and you install the uh the leads and then it'll actually take a couple of days and just monitor so what what they found is different things they turn on have different like signatures like you mentioned like for example your your dishwasher turns on that has like this in it it may be a little spike from a motor that runs a thing or maybe your washing machine has a signature or your when you're when your refrigerator kicks in it'll start to track it and then you kind of give it a little bit of input like it'll go hey what just happened was that this and you go yeah i did just run the washing machine they go got it that's the washing machine and they can actually track all your devices without anything else just ai like machine learning really cool stuff and the pull point there is to just look at your usage and try to lower it like hey 4 to 9 pm do i need to be running my dishwasher right now what if i just said run it at 10 o'clock and didn't run it at this time so those are the kinds of things you can do to like lower your bill and i've always been pretty aggressive about lowering my you know all i have all led light bulbs in my house i have for years uh stuff like that so if even if you can't get solar if you can't do batteries there's always fun things you can do to try to try to save well you know uh captain planet would always say reduce reuse recycle right yeah well in this case if you reduce the amount of electricity that your home is using that's where i always tell people start there if you could reduce the amount of electricity that your home is using you're going to reduce the number of panels that you need to buy thereby reducing the cost right so uh you know common things that people could look at in most homes are air conditioning units are they being tuned up are they being maintained so that they're not running inefficiently um is your pool pump a variable speed pool pump versus a single speed pull pump um you know how are you heating in the house if you're heating with electricity with space heaters versus natural gas you're you're going to use a lot less electricity to heat with natural gas in your wood with electricity so you know there's different ways that you can go about reducing the usage of electricity thereby reducing your bill or and or thereby reducing how much you spend on solar yeah well said and you know what we tell people these things even though for everybody watching that knows anything about drone quote we only we don't sell anybody's information we don't sell anything other than well we don't sell anything we help people make buying decisions about solar so our job is to help educate the consumer so that they know exactly what they're getting and why they're getting it and beforehand let's figure out what we could do to reduce the size of the system because that's in your best interest and if your best interests are covered then drone quotes doing our job yeah exactly one of um as i mentioned dozens of my viewers have gone with drone quote one of them wrote me i don't know if i told you this one of my viewers wrote me recently and they said what they're gonna do is they got a big system installed last year and with the tax return that they're gonna get this year right it was 26 last year so with that tax return they're gonna use that to get the battery this year so they're gonna do like a power wall with the money that they got back so that's that's the thing i always i always think is these are expensive stuff like i've spent a lot of money on solar i've spent money on powerwalls but it doesn't have to all be right now it you can spend it out you can uh you could spread it out and and say look i'm gonna do this today i'm gonna add this later there was a question earlier again it was from ian he says um i think his question was let me just pull it up here he he asked if you could add to us a tesla system so if we have a tesla solar roof with powerballs can i bring your own can i bring an additional array of panels be added so if you have the solar glass roof like the the the roof tiles with built-in solar you don't want to go stick on solar panels to that that'd be crazy what you could do is you can call them and say hey when i got this installed i only needed this much generation so you know some of these tiles were dummy tiles could you come back now i want more generation and they can take out dummy tiles that don't produce and replace them with panels that do or if you get a normal tesla solar installation like solar panels on top of your roof of course you can add to it they use a string inverter right so i don't know if you can there might be some like series and parallel considerations as far as like could they add them to the same circuit or would they have to like run a new line back to the circuit breaker but they could it might vary on your situation right yeah and in most uh tesla installations that we've seen they use solar edge um so solar as long as you have the capacity in that inverter you can typically add to it or and or if the orientation of your roof is such that you know you're producing half of your power in the morning and half of your power in the evening from an east-west orientation then that'll buy you some flexibility as well um but you also have to have the roof space available for it right and or the roof space that is not going to be compromised by shade or or space constraints ian also makes a really great point he says 53 likes and 123 watching question mark i agree so let's try to get those let's let's get those likes up we'd appreciate that all right um one thing people have are asking is about i don't know where the end of the world conversations kind of started but uh apparently isaac newton uh predicted it'll be 2060 the minds of 2012. i think they were off by a couple of years there um yeah there's there's so matthew schmitz asks when will solar panels get more efficient than the low 20 area so i'll take this one this is this is interesting you can you can you can kind of tell where there's challenges in like engineering and scientific breakthroughs when you see these like perceived walls if you will right like for example when will the internal combustion engine the gas car get more than 35 efficient the answer is basically it's never going to happen it's not possible um we've been trying to make them more efficient for years and we're still maybe in the 40s at this point but that means like 60 of all the gas you burn in your gas car is just wasted as heat and noise and stuff so there's fundamental like physics kind of limitations if you will here uh i think we're gonna need like a fundamental breakthrough in solar production to break beyond like the 2530 barrier so right now we have this photovoltaic system and based on how we are currently doing it i don't see us breaking beyond 30 unless there's like some step change the technology but the thing is as it gets cheaper it doesn't really matter because the sun is blasting enough solar energy that even at 20 efficient it's totally fine if the panels are cheap enough and you can cover your roof in it you keep your roof cooler you keep your house cooler and you'll still be just fine my 12 panels which doesn't even occupy let's say a 20 20 of my roof not even 20 of my roof produces 40 kilowatt hours a day that's incredible so um keep that in mind and also i mean your viewers don't know this but there's a little bit of shade consideration for your property and you're still producing the amount of power you're producing yeah so that's i i haven't seen any questions about shave i kind of thought there would be uh shade is is solar's worst nightmare you don't want any shade and i actually have a lot of i have a lot of trees on my property just everywhere and when the so one thing with solar remember is that the angle where the sun is in the sky is really kind of overhead in summertime like the sun is very high in the sky and it goes lower and lower in the horizon during and you know on the shortest day of the year like december 21st it's really low in the sky so when that is the case there's more likelihood for shade because a tree that didn't seem that tall before suddenly now it's gonna cast shadows and so you're gonna have the worst shade between september and march and you'll have the lowest amount of shade you know so all that kind of factors in but when you get a quote from someone like drone quote you guys factor that in you guys take a look at the trees and you'll know like what to recommend because if you have a lot of shading you definitely want to do something like power optimizers for a string inverter or honestly i've always preferred micro inverters for that reason although if you're feeding it into a battery maybe you want to keep it as a string inverter because you can just go dc to dc in my system right now i actually go dc from the panels my micrometers make it ac and then it has to go back to dc to charge my powerwall so not the most efficient but shade is a shade is something you have to work in and they actually make panels now they're pretty expensive still they make panels where even on the panel level shade isn't a problem like if you have some shade in the bottom of the panel it doesn't hurt the top of the panel uh all this is because the way they're wired up in parallel means that any drop off on one cell is going to have a chain reaction effect on others but nothing if i can't if i could just simplify the whole concept of shade for people i know that sounds maybe silly to say but if you could think of your solar panel electricity generation as moving water right if you block the flow of water in one you know section of the plumbing the other end of the plumbing where water would have been coming out is no longer receiving you know a current of water so what ricky just mentioned with these you know higher efficiency panels they're able to flow the electricity in a manner that doesn't inhibit the electricity generation when half of the panel is being shaded by i don't know a tree or a structure of your home chimney or what have you so there are a lot of improvements there but as you mentioned also you pay for that right and you can mitigate it on a bigger level at a lower cost with micro inverters and or with uh power optimizers with from solar edge um you know and if you have the space available then you can make up the fact that some of your panels are going to be shaded by adding a few more panels and going to lower cost panels like hanwa or um that's qcell by the way or a canadian solar will allow you to make up that difference because you're not spending a nominal leg on buying something like sunpower or panasonic which are great panels it's just that you're paying more for them and if they're going to be shaded you know why pay more for them and they're going to be in the shade if you have the space available that is yeah and that i actually quickly realized you mentioned when you talk about like picking the kind of solar panels you want to use it's really kind of a question of how big is your house and your roof if you have a massive ranch style house where you have like hundreds and hundreds of square feet of roof space available then you don't really have to get the most efficient you can really try to just optimize on the price part of it but if you have like a two-story house and the actual roof is pretty small especially the south-facing part you don't want to have panels on the north-facing part if you're in the northern hemisphere the sun is on the other side then you want to go as efficient as you can because you don't have to deal with the fact that you only have a certain amount of space but when you when you get quotes and stuff from any company they're going to walk you through the bill how much you're currently paying how your roof is looking and give you considerations for that um you know i want to add at a point there uh because it's a real thorn in my side unfortunately when you know our sales associates speak with homeowners who had a quote from it's usually national companies and or you know sales reps that are being less than ethical if there is space on anything south that's the best place to land on if you're in the northern hemisphere as you mentioned if you're on the west side that's also really good because you're producing later into the day when time of use rates in some cases have gone up or you're more likely to see demand charges east is great because your panels are there on the cooler side of the roof when the sun's coming up but you're also producing electricity when it may not be worth as much now what really gets me is when you have these companies that are placing panels on the north side as you mentioned and there's a lot of roof space available on other surface areas of the roof and we come in and we make a suggestion for you know eight or five or however many less panels in this other company and the homeowner immediately is saying well why are you suggesting less panels the other company is suggesting you know all these panels and we look at their quotes and the panels are on the north side of the roof and their space still on other surfaces of the roof but they're still using the north side that is a way by which you can increase the size of the system thereby increasing the sales person's commission right i i can't stand when i see that because it's really doing the homeowner to service so if you're anybody watching this if you're planning on installing solar do what you can to stay away from the north side of the roof if possible and if somebody's placing panels on the north side ask them why and ask them what that's going to do to do to the efficiency relative to other sections of your roof unless you live in australia in which case do that get them on the north side north yes well that's the northern that's the southern hemisphere so it's your point right exactly most people that we talk with are in the northern hemisphere exactly yeah i actually i've seen a neighbor um the way my house is actually perfect for solar because if you walk by the house you can't even see my panels they're all on the on the on the south side on the back so looking at the front of the house you can't even tell so my house is pretty much perfect but there's a neighbor that has them on the front of the house and they have like these like huge risers and metal poles it's just the most they're just yeah and they're talking about right yeah i i first i thought it might be because of shading from trees but honestly when i look back there you could easily top off some of the trees and it would be a non-factor and it would be kind of stealth and blended instead of this ridiculously crazy thing that they have now but these are the kinds of things that matter don't get stuck on i have this many panels and they're this and that look at your numbers because that's where the real end point is if you have tons of shade and you don't have micro inverters or you don't have a good system for that or you have on the wrong side they're not going to really help you very much while we're talking about this by the way one thing i would recommend at least you think about and talk to your installers about think about putting panels on the west facing part of your roof and the reason why i say that is because currently like i mentioned especially in california and places where there's a lot of solar we have so much generation that we're wasting electricity we're throwing it out what we need is electricity later in the day so if i had i don't really have a west facing roof as you know that's why i would i would have done it already but on the west facing roof all day you know two three in the afternoon not much has happened but suddenly as the sun is setting it starts hitting these panels and so now you're making electricity from three four five six pm and that is when we need electricity that electricity would not get curtailed that's when people are coming home running their air conditioning and so west facing and south facing are the two i wouldn't worry about uh east facing like in the early morning people aren't really using electricity it's not hot yet it's not you know so west and south if you're the northern hemisphere is the best way to go that electricity on the east side is just in most cases it's not worth as much money as your south or west facing electricity during the latter part of the day you know actually we're talking about net metering right now uh i'm you know to those of you that don't know the reason why we are describing some roof faces over others is because the value of electricity in some in some utilities changes during the time of the day right based on well demand and the time so uh i want to bring up texas you brought up texas earlier um when these outages happened a few weeks ago we saw a significant increase in our traffic from texas and a lot of people wanting to install solar in texas you know i got to say that the the biggest challenge that we've had with texas is that it's a deregulated utility state and what that means is that i could buy my electricity from abc electricity xyz electricity and so on and so on and what that also means is that these entities are able to form their own rules for net energy metering which is another way of saying you give me electricity i store it for you in the grid and then when you use it i give it back to you and i also don't charge you for it i charge the credit that we gave you earlier right so a lot of these utilities don't have net energy metering or if they do have it it's paltry rates where you were paying you know 11 14 cents per kilowatt hour to the utility but they're giving you two three cents per unit of electricity so it makes it difficult in some cases to install solar for that reason or we've had customers in texas as well where they installed solar and then the utility pulled the net metering agreement and that's a really tough position for us to be in because we help them install the system but even worse for the homeowner because they're the ones that paid for it and now the utility said hey you know that net metering agreement we had it's no longer available and you're now stuck with a system that's producing power and you're getting you know pennies on the dollar for that utility uh excuse me for that electricity and that's where a battery would come in very handy yeah so let's talk a little bit about this people have told me and you can probably chime in here people in florida have said that it is illegal to be off grid like you can't just say you know what i'm not paying anymore i'm gonna make my own power i have my own batteries uh screw you i'm out of here that's illegal which is bizarre i don't understand how you could make it illegal to not use a service but anyway um let's talk about the the different approaches of of how solar work and this is really important because we don't have the batteries if we had batteries this is not a conversation we even need to have because you make power you store it you use it later the utility doesn't even know you exist basically they're like oh he's on vacation because he's not using any power but when you don't have a battery you got to give it to the grid so now you're it's up to the grid to tell you how they feel about you doing that i've already told you in california there's points in the day and you got to feel for the grid operator because at noon there's points in the day when they're throwing away electricity because there's so many people solar making electricity that they don't need and then they have to give you a credit for this so that's the debate what i have because i got solar 10 years ago is i have net i have a very favorable net energy metering plan and how it works is if i give them a kilowatt at 4 pm today and i use one extra tomorrow zero my bill would be zero i used one i gave them one even footing which is ideal and awesome but i've heard from a lot of viewers that they don't get that i bet you the gentleman who mentioned he has 10 cents billing i bet you if his net energy meeting he would not get 10 cents when he gave one to them so the way they get around this is utility goes well wait a minute we don't pay the power plant 10 cents to sell to you for 10 cents we pay the power plant 3 cents and we sell to you for 10 cents right so if you want to give us electricity we'll give you the wholesale price which is 3 cents which means now you make three kilowatts one day and you send to the grid and they'll say okay they'll give you a credit of nine cents and then tomorrow you use one kilowatt will bill you ten cents and you actually still owe them a penny so these are the kinds of questions that you should probably ask your grid uh your utility company about before you even go solar call up and say hey i'm thinking about going solar break it down for me how does it work do i get a one to one i use one i i i send one zero or is it like wholesale and retail pricing how does it work and get that answer first up front because that'll depend that'll really otherwise if you get a huge system and you're just sending them electricity at the high solar times it might not even be worth it for you i've even heard of some utilities that won't give you any credit at all so it's literally pointless they're out there and not only that but there's another question that i would be asking my utility if i was installing solar is are there levels if there is a net meter agreement that is favorable are there levels of um of people that join that net energy metering agreement where then they reduce it to the next tier down right nevada energy is a really good example of that where i believe they're in the mid 80s excuse me their current their current rate for net energy meteoring is that they're giving you about 85 percent of the value of that kilowatt hour so if they're charging you 10 cents they're giving you eight and a half cents which you should leave some money on the table but if you're using a lot of electricity it may still make some sense for you right so ask your utility if there are any uh caps is what i should have been saying caps to the net metering uh number of people that could join that that particular agreement and if there are you know what how many where are you in that cap or in other words is it about to be filled where it's going to bump down to the next tier which is less favorable and also if you find out that there are caps ask the sales company that's putting together your quotes where they see you going into that net metering agreement because a lot of times and we see this often in nevada where we bring it to the homeowner's attention and they tell us oh well nobody else has said this and i've already got several other quotes yeah well the other company was just trying to make a sale i'm worried more about what you have to say about drunk post sale than even making the sale because if i'm putting you in a position where you have something negative to say it's really detrimental to our company so i'm going to make sure that our our staff is a very uh straightforward with you and gives you the information that you need up front so that you make a decision based on accurate data or accurate knowledge very well said uh really quickly shibu k had asked a couple of times about tesla solar so first of all tesla doesn't make solar panels so if you have a tesla system they're buying as you mentioned probably from qcell or some company and they install them so they're just an installer like any other installer they've got good prices but based on where you live there could be a huge backlog they might not have a lot of people are trained there yet so you might take a little bit of a you know it might be cheaper but it might be more painful in terms of the planning and the organization of it all but tesla is a fantastic option for sure then there is the power wall which is he called it the power bank so yeah it's a battery bank it's a power storage system called the power wall and he also asked is it better to keep it inside or outside so i live in san diego where it never gets very cold like the coldest point of the year is still above freezing so it'll never freeze pretty much here so for that reason i have it outside because i if i had inside i'd lose storage like shelving space in my garage i have this huge shelving wall and i'd have to give it up if i wanted to have the power wall inside so i was like no put it out there doesn't matter to me but if you live in a place where it's really cold or it gets really hot like really you know non not san diego then maybe put it inside your garage that way you have a little more protection you don't want these batteries to be you know at negative 20 degrees if you live like in canada or like like chicago or something you don't want them to get too cold so i would put them on the inside so it'll depend really on where you live and and how that works also there um uh osteoary crawford says if there is too much electricity during the day why don't they make hydrogen with the excess i think that's exactly what's going to start happening people need to start getting hip to the fact that even if you have too much solar and not enough battery storage that's there's no such thing as a bad situation with having too much solar generation take that solar generation you're exactly right maybe you know electrolysis hydro hydrogen from electrolysis isn't the most efficient uh method but if you have too much excess electricity do that store like hydrogen and start selling hydrogen to people for refilling stations that uh the reason why we don't do that currently is there's no demand for hydrogen we have like 200 trader mirai's there's there's no demand for it but if that changed like if we had freight trucks or you know barges and boats that needed hydrogen they would start doing it so i think the day when that come i think that will happen probably the next couple of years that's funny you mentioned toyota maria's i was reading a story about the owners of that vehicle having uh pretty much bricks because there aren't enough uh stations to fill up their vehicle so good point on that question he mentioned or that comment yeah when when i've always said like the free market and this is why i hate when i hear stories about like it's illegal to do this like don't do that the government should not tell people like what that they it's illegal to not be connected to the grid that's like you're forcing someone to be a customer that's not freedom um but i've always said the free market when there's a vacuum if there's a need for something like oh man we have so much hydrogen usage we i wish there was more height people will get in like when there's a vacuum people will fill it there will be companies that do that so really it's just kind of a chicken or the egg thing where we have to start to use it more frequently i think that will be happening first in japan japan i think is all in on on hydrogen so they're probably going to be the country that kind of sets the standard for how to generate it and and use it in more applications and the hydrogen waste product will quench your thirst what's that the hydrogen waste product will quench your thirst because it makes water yeah and speaking of like kind of emergency preparedness and stuff i'll put a link to the live stream later but um our friend ben sullivan's has done a video where he bought this product from a company it looks like a solar panel it's like a big panel that they install on your roof and it'll pull out the water from the air and and send it down into a bottle like purified water out of the air and he was saying he makes like a couple liters a day so even if you had electricity even if you had a power outage there's a natural gas there's no electricity there's a storm as long as the sun is shining he has water he has electricity and everything which is really cool i want to do a future episode on that but yeah there's some really cool breakthroughs happening i think it's still expensive at this point but pretty cool yeah there's a lot of different ways we could things we could do with the extra solar generation let's see if there's some other good questions okay so eric has mentioned a couple times um does a tesla solar glass roof uh set off the peel and stick membrane thus keeping the air moving to cool the panels and roof that's a good question um i mean just based on the the tesla power wall roofs that i've seen installed um i i don't see there being a lot of airflow to you know mitigate the loss of efficiency now granted this is coming from a dude that's 5'6 so you can't really see roots very well right because i'm not on it um that is a really good question i don't have an answer for it but that's something that i i often discuss with homeowners because you know they see these solar panels with skirts around them and i tell people look it may look aesthetically more pleasing but you're losing efficiency you want to have as much airflow to reduce the heat on the panels because the misconception is that the solar panels are being heated and that's creating electricity and you know i would imagine most viewers know that that's not the case so you want to have airflow underneath those panels and i don't know the answer to eric's question i think you mentioned um but that is a really good point i'm sure they've thought that through though yeah so the solar glass roof i don't think there's much in the way of ventilation underneath it but they're like the ridge and vent system the the overall roofing system is well designed for a good ventilation to keep your attic cool and the fact that the entire roof is like a radiant barrier means your attic is going to be wildly cooler than than normal and also in the winter the opposite it'll be warmer than normal because radiant heat is blocked in either direction but yeah as far as um as far as the the exact question uh you remember uh eric you remember remember i talked to mo who was the installer for good faith energy in texas uh send me a message i can ask him that question and and give you a better idea but yeah not exactly it's funny to see how wildly varying people's electricity prices are i always find that fascinating you know there's like hawaii new york california and then there's people who are like i paid nine cents all day every day one tier and i use 2 000 kilowatt hours a month um and you know it costs you just brought up a really good point um and i'm gonna tie it back to the batteries in regards to how much electricity people use so i live in a state where the cost of electricity is eight cents it's eight cents and there's tier two which is a whopping nine cents so i use a lot of electricity in my in my home and a lot of times when people think about storage they think okay well i use electricity if i have a battery i'm good but the thing is that the battery has a capacity of 13 kilowatt hours if we're timeout to test the power wall and you're not using you don't have access to all 13 kilowatt hours you have access to a little bit less than that that's the depth of discharge that we were talking about earlier so you have to understand as the homeowner what is a total volume of electricity that i'm using for the year if i'm using you know on average of i don't know 2 000 kilowatt hours a month it's going to be difficult for your battery to keep up with that amount of electricity so you're not going to have a battery if you do install batteries you're going to have batteries plural right and also you're going to want to make sure that you're tying those batteries to breakers that aren't going to draw the draw them down you know in uh you know a brief amount of time so the amount of electricity you use and where you're using electricity is super important relative to your meeting your expectations so that's something that your company that's helping you or if it's us drunk will help you figure out how to meet expectations with reality so that you are left with the feeling of i got my money's worth and that's super important and unfortunately in most cases people don't realize that they did or did not get their money's worth well after the system's been installed and operational yeah good point there was one question i had uh from viewers earlier when i had a little poll which was about the span are you familiar with that smart meter uh well yeah the smart meter is very prevalent in san diego no sorry um the smart um like electric like the junction box like the your main house circuit breaker the smart breaker no i'm not no so span is i forgot it's a smart access panel or something like that but it's a um it's like a wi-fi enabled smart device where you could on your little iphone your smartphone you could sit there and like turn on and turn off breakers for your house and you can monitor the the energy usage of each circuit in your house right obviously because it's built in so again ben sullins if most of you guys are probably from ben sullins channel he has one installed and he's he's he's made a video about it but it's pretty cutting edge tech right now i'd imagine that in the next couple of years it'll be more accessible but yeah they've taken your they've taken your entire utility panel and made that entire thing smart so there's some cool things that you can do with that right like if you're going on vacation you can just like turn off breakers you can see if there's like excessive usage from one circuit in your house and you realize oh man i left the the hit the blow dryer on or the you know the hair straightener the hair curling iron in the case did you leave your hair straightener on ricky yeah you know i do all the time it's a huge problem for me um but but yeah there's there's some really cool stuff in that realm i think they're still pretty expensive but as far as installation costs and stuff i mean getting one of these panels installed is probably gonna cost you two thousand dollars that's right eric um but there's some cool benefits again it's all about nerding out on data if you're the kind of person who nerds out on data that thing would be wildly interesting to you and if you're not you wouldn't care at all about it so that's the way i would put it at this point and then what you just mentioned right now on a price for a panel upgrade a standard panel that's not a smart panel as you mentioned um it's gonna set you back roughly about twenty five hundred dollars for those people watching roughly assuming that there aren't any you know uh digging costs or um you know surprises like uh moving into a different location or significant stucco repair or you know other things exactly people are proposing different options of what to do with excess uh solar energy for one you know they're saying like you know compress gas during the day and release it at night um people have said you should you know mine bitcoin it's actually a great idea i think the reason why people aren't doing that is because you can't get your hands on computer parts like graphics cards and stuff are wildly out of stock i had an email notification at a website to tell me when they have the new nvidia rtx 3090 in stock it's been six months and it's enough there's nothing and there's a significant chip shortage just across the board right if i'm not i'm if i'm watching the news correctly it's it's uh it's it's really having an impact on auto manufacturers from what i was reading yeah exactly um it's yeah it's a crazy thing but i am planning a video on the future of like mechanical energy storage we always think of batteries we think about like a or chemical batteries i should say like a lithium lithium ion battery but there's a lot of ways you can store energy you could pump water up a hill and roll it back down like hydro power right we've done that and you do do that to some level but there's you know yeah it's uh then there's like a flywheel you could just take a big heavy mass and have you know like when you have excess energy use it to spin it up and overcome all that inertia and then now that it's spinning up when you need extra power you can flip it around and run as a generator and use that extra angular momentum to power whatever you need there's also things like you can just take like a huge amount of springs and compress them with extra energy and then when you need it you can have it release really it just comes down to increasing like kinetic or potent in the case of water it'd be potential energy in this in the case of springs like you know you take potential energy from the kinetic energy there's different ways to do it i'm going to do an entire episode about this because i think it's wildly fascinating but bitcoin mining as cool as i think it would be i don't think is going to happen just because of the cost of of hardware for that i like the idea of the water i know that that's one of the biggest batteries is that you know as we would think of batteries is a lake i think it was somewhere in uh i don't remember it was california or new york but they move electricity excuse me they move the water up with electricity and they move it down to generate electricity and i think they've done this around uh the cost of electricity around different times of the day uh i don't know an npr story i read a while heard a while back yeah um compressed air batteries gravity batteries liquid air batteries there's all kinds of new innovations and breakthroughs when you don't need to be overly energy dense i think there's a lot of options for um for storing that energy because i want us to kind of think of it like that we we have been talking about going solar we talk about getting panels generating electricity we've gotten really good at that we all have roofs we the panel prices have come down so much the rebate is is back it's wildly it's a good time to buy solar the thing now is to think i love what my viewers said about i'm gonna take this year to get solar take the tax credit and earmark that to put that toward getting a battery the following year that's that's a really cool idea um but we need to store it as well that's along the lines of what i suggest to people when i have the pleasure of discussing you know the benefits of solar and that is uh i i've always seen solar as um in a weird way of kind of like a money generating machine because it helps you avoid a cost that you would otherwise spend money on right so if you're able to take that money that you're saving let's say you save 150 a month on electricity because you installed solar and you put those 150 a month towards buying down debt that you may have or putting into an interest yielding account i mean with uh with uh compound interest that's just the possibilities that solar or saving on electricity open for you when you do take advantage of them in a an efficient manner are great i know you could turn those savings into a lot more money by utilizing that money somewhere else and that's one of the things that i personally love about solar don't get me wrong i love the green aspect to it and i love how it'll make you energy independent but when i talk about the green aspect the green i'm talking about has a benjamin franklin on it right so no i think to your point i've always said you know when when you went on economics that's when you have that moment of like mass adoption you have to put on economics and solar really is is there now i'm at this point there was a question about from brian a if you have the same square footage of solar roof tiles i'm thinking the solar glass roof from tesla versus the same amount of space for the solar panels which will win the solar panels are more efficient so from what from what i read with tesla solar glass roof the the efficiency is actually lower but because the entire roof could potentially be generating electricity it's again the efficiency isn't so important it's really about you have this much roof space and i want to produce you know six kilowatts or something like that and then you can size the number of producing versus non-producing panels but the panels are more efficient right now they are and then you also you're also paying a lot less for them so by that measure it's another degree of efficiency you get out of regular solar panels the only drawback is the aesthetics to some people right yeah exactly dolo says uh solar worth it in florida and i would say really it comes down to um you know after after what happened in texas i think having preparedness like maybe not being like a doomsday prepper but being a prepper i saw a tweet i loved he said after what happened in florida the person said new rule no one can ever make fun of preppers ever again and i i i kind of i hit like on that one i was like you know what people make fun of people who go too far with this maybe but the reality is being prepared is always in style and that's the way i look at this so if you're if you're happy to know that there's some outside force providing electricity and you're okay to trust them with that fine if you're kind of a energy if you're a control freak and you want to have your own generation on your own house then solar makes sense anywhere but if it's for the economic reasons then that's different i think florida has very cheap electricity prices for example and so for that reason well we've sold a few systems in florida and although they do have a lower cost of electricity they also have um they also have a you're competing with their own they being their utility their own energy farms and so you definitely have the option to buy renewable energy from the utility without having to install solar i personally think that you know if you can have that energy independence it's going to be of benefit to you and i've yet to meet anybody in my lifetime that has been prepared for something that regretted being prepared right so what's true right man so if you're really you're having electricity when when nobody else had it um but but giving yourself the ability to be independent of the utility uh there's a there's just a feeling to it that i found when i installed solar in my home that definitely gave me a sense of self-reliance and that to me is a big part of the value right i can't quantify that in dollars and cents but knowing that the electricity coming out of my roof is my own electricity generated through my own means there's a lot to be said about that yeah well said there's some questions about the hurricane resistance i don't know have you dealt with uh installations in in heavy hurricane prone areas like florida we have but we haven't had any homeowners call us back and tell us hey my f my panels flew away um so the same thing that i was mentioning to you guys earlier about having airflow underneath the panels will be a detriment if you have significantly high winds and it'll also come down to how the panels were installed so i'll mention this here in regards to the cost of the system and the quality of installation that you can have good cheap and fast but you can't have all three as you've heard right so if you want a quality installation you sometimes will pay a little bit more for it or it'll come from a company that has a longer standing and a better reputation than some other companies but to answer your question have we had any issues with the wind we have not but they're not unlikely in a place like florida and the thing about those panels is that if you have enough airflow underneath them the panels are pretty big they're about three and a half feet by five feet roughly and they'll create a lot of uh lift if you get enough wind underneath them so i mean it's definitely a potential for for uh some issues so depending on how is installed yeah i remember when i i was getting my patio installed you know there's certain area like local building codes that require certain things like you know use these hurricane ties that you know prevent you from having like like you mentioned air come from underneath and treat your patio or your solar panels as a sale and pick up and lift it so we had to follow the codes for san diego we don't have hurricanes here but we had to follow all the building codes for that for that to happen i'm curious i'm sure when it comes to solar in florida things are different like maybe the rise off the roof to your point is lower maybe you do the skirts which you mentioned earlier maybe that's a good idea that we don't have wind coming underneath and lifting up on these panels there's probably things to to to do but i remember one of my colleagues when i forgot the name of the the hurricane in florida like two three years ago when that came through they had damage to their roof like tiles came came off and they had to come in have someone come in and fix them so i think you just generally have concerns when it comes to hurricanes and and hopefully there's there's the requirements and stuff of how to install them maybe the strength of the of the roof mounting system all that stuff is is just more expensive to do in florida for that reason that you're you're protected but um you know it's the same kind of question i've gotten about hail typically these panels are you know it's a tempered glass they should be pretty resilient a tesla glass roof or solar panels or whatever you get they should have a good hail rating but again you might have a baseball sized hail event that you can't prepare for the kind of event that will damage even normal roofs and stuff so um there's probably a little bit of concern there but there's that's what home insurance is for right that's right and i will add to damage to the conversation in regards to damage to solar panels my son uh i think he threw a rock i actually know what it was i made him a slingshot that's where i messed up i made my son a slingshot and he launched a rock into the sky and it landed on our solar panel and it shattered the panel so one panel was completely shattered that you could see the impact and then everywhere where it's spider webbed throughout the entire panel and i lost about eight percent efficiency on that solar panel but when i saw how much electricity i was still generating i was like i'm not going to pay for a whole new panel this thing's still producing power and in the big picture only this one panel is messed up so it'll continue to produce a significant amount of power overall so they are resilient they really i i had a similar experience as well i had one of my panels uh that i've replaced or you know just my experiment penalty fuel that i've been messing with it had shattered and was broken and the output was not it was much more than eight percent but it was maybe like 25 reduction in output but it just kept on plugging and just making electricity they're shockingly uh resilient but obviously if that happens i think you'd probably want to replace it but yeah even if you didn't it would be making electricity yeah you know i was i would go as far as to say that you know the beer says that diamonds are forever right yes forever as we know without a question no i would yeah i would definitely add uh solar panels as almost being forever because they are very resilient and they do produce long into the future and i i think i told you earlier my pat my first five panels and i love these things you know even though i've i've thought about oh i can upgrade them now and you know make more electricity i'm not going to because i want to make a video 10 years from now and say my panels turn 20 and keep covering it but 10 years later they are up there they have never missed a beat they continue to make power they don't need me to i don't have to worry about them at all i lose track of the day they just keep on trucking it's such a great investment i really do think they paid for themselves uh on year eight and a half like about 8.7 years i think was my calculation they had paid for themselves and that was based on my installing them in 2010. you know i had a 1.2 kilowatt system in 2010. i could have had a four kilowatt system for the same price in 2021 so that just shows you how far we've come but even then all that said i've been through two refrigerators i've been through four cars i got married to have two kids my whole life has changed but the only two constants in my life have been i have the same house and i have the the solar panels i know it sounds crazy but i i cannot under emphasize this because there's a lot of people who kind of like the flyby people who come in and watch a video of mine and say oh those panels will be dead in five years like you have no idea how wrong you are they are wildly um widely efficient and wildly uh durable man it's funny that you put it that way there like that uh your solar panels lasted longer than my first marriage man well you know you want to go there but i mean i'll go there it's all good you know i've had i've had like five cars four four cars in that time um yeah i mean think i mean how many computers have i gone through how many monitors or tvs or you know and none of this stuff people never say oh that that computer's stupid you're gonna get rid of it in five years but we we think about solar that way but it's it's the opposite man like they're just and what else can just be out in the sun without worry and just keep on working if you ever put a t like a t-shirt out in the sun for a day it'll get bleach it'll be completely destroyed ultraviolet light is a is a nightmare it destroys everything um unless you know plants evolve to handle it or you know we have plastic and even plastic only like uv rated exterior grade plastic can withstand uh it's brutally rough but panels panels are reliable um the one thing i'll say too is remember about the uh the warranty stuff if you're the kind of person who uh for me really the warranty was more like oh i have a warranty i never even thought to to worry about it so if it's more of a peace of mind thing it's not a big deal but if you're the kind of person who the minute anything's up you're calling for the warranty stuff go with a better name brand for the panels and go with a bigger name company because you don't want to have that feeling of well that sucks that company is no longer operating and i can't get my my warranty work done um also what can you give us a little information about um because i've gotten this question before about your insurance do you so like for example i got solar panels my house now has twenty thousand dollars more worth of stuff should my insurance go up will my insurance cover it how does that work yeah so when i installed solar uh i i have usa usaa homeowners insurance and i don't remember the exact number off the top of my head but it was a very negligible number but to answer your question directly my insurance did go up i i don't recall it was such an insignificant number that i don't recall the amount by which it went up but it did definitely uh it did go up and had i filed an insurance claim i would have paid you know the deductible that's why when i broke that well when my son broke that panel i was like yeah i'm not gonna you know file an insurance camp it's not worth it but you will see a slight increase in your insurance unless you opt for a ppa a power purchase agreement by because the insurance is going to be carried by the holder of that note gotcha um does anybody have any questions there's there's good conversations about energy storage and and kind of like these are these are people like us who are nerd out about this clearly i can just tell from the comments that there's people who think about this a lot there was a question about heat exchangers maybe some heat pumps and stuff so i think part of the question was if you've ever heard of a solar panel actually there's probably two kinds you've probably heard of one is a photovoltaic which is what we're talking about where sunlight hits it moves photons and you're able to collect the electricity from that and produce electricity the other thing is uh thermal heating like a a a hot water heater so you have this kind of black what looks like a ribbon on your roof and water is passed through like a coil system and the sun is hitting it and heating up that water so that way the inlet temperature of the water might have been 60 degrees fahrenheit but the outlet temperature is 120 degrees or something it depends on how hot the sun is and stuff that's really great passive way to heat pools or even like a tankless you know a hot heat water heater now there's potentially i guess a way you could combine both into one panel so you have like a heat exchanger to to have like passive heating which will then cool off the panels and make them more efficient so you know the heat you collect in this water system inside the panel underneath and on top you have photovoltaic so there's potentially uh a way to combine the two although that exists i've seen it come in that does that but it's there's just there's now a moving you know substance through those panels and the connectivity becomes an issue so these are leaks or something yes these solar panels that you're describing for thermal solar panels for pools is a really good example they have a lifespan of about 10 to 15 years because the sun wears down the plastics and then leaks start to happen so the complexity with these pv photovoltaic slash heating panels is that you have that water the connectivity issue between the panels and you have leaks of water in theory it sounds like a really cool concept because you are increasing efficiency of the solar panels but they're not big for a reason i don't even know the name of the company i don't remember them yeah i mean it's and also just remember that the the water heating power is wildly reduced because of the panel on top of it so these kinds of these systems like the improvements they make for the complexity they add it was kind of like that the solar tracking mechanical stuff it's not worth the extra probably headache of it all and you know leaking fixtures and the plumbing and all that so um that's probably why somebody also mentioned a bi-facial panel earlier i remember i don't know so this is the panel that has solar panels on the bottom as well right yeah so these panels are they actually look really sleek i like the bi-facial solar panels especially you're putting them on a white or very light colored roof because you have a lot of reflection of light to get the underneath section of the panel uh but they're frameless panels typically they are it's just glass around the panels rather than an aluminum frame and you do pick up an efficiency increase because of the fact that you have that underneath electricity being generated they're not as common um and they do have special use applications typically on uh commercial buildings where the roofs tend to be white uh but if you have like uh where i've seen them used in a residential manner is when it comes to like a a patio structure yeah exactly and they look so nice it really does so yeah bi-facial just means you have the panels on top like all panels but then you have panels on the bottom so clearly they're in different strings because the top is going to be producing most of it but the bottom now can get any kind of reflected sunlight from like you mentioned a patio structure and that's where i've seen them used commercially imagine if you have like a big car carport or something you use these and some level of light is going to hit the floor and bounce and that they can collect on the bottom side and add another twenty percent or something of efficiency so very good it's actually the same cell it's it's the same cell on the front and the bottom or the top and the bottom and that's why they're they're glass frames so that you don't have a back sheet because like for example sun power has a very efficient back sheet but you lose all that upside or the downside electricity that's a very good point that's really less common like i mentioned there's also the the pat the shade resistant panels from a company i forget the name of the company now um but those are all kind of more specialty odds are the panels you get are going to just be pretty traditional especially because that's what's mass produced and more widely available and yeah there's talks about like heat pumps and stuff i just want to quickly mention our next video is going to be on why heat pumps will be the future of home heating so definitely subscribe and and and stay tuned for that we'll talk a little bit about the the efficiency gains of of going that route um there are some definitely holistic kind of systems so we can be thinking about anything that makes extra heat could be used to heat something usefully and you know and vice versa so i mean there's there's like a there's a lot of like synergy in a home that isn't really captured and that's where i think people have made kind of conjecture that tesla might do some sort of like an hvac system which maybe ties all that together and takes like the waste heat from this and uses the heat a hot water heater and and kind of close the loop of all that heat motion and stuff so nothing yet they've announced but i think elon is the kind of nerd that would love to tackle a problem like that so it's probably just a matter of time so justin asks uh when and how will the broader solar pv market get to tesla's two dollar per watt price for most areas outside of california payback is still more than 10 years so what i think tesla has done really well and i'll give some level of credit to drunk quote because we're moving in that direction as well is that they've automated or removed removed the sales person as much as possible from the the equation and also their customer acquisition cost is extremely low because they have this business with their vehicles right and and batteries as well i guess you could say uh but mainly vehicles where they have a customer that purchased their their vehicle and now they can offer them you know additional products and without having to market to that customer to purchase their solar panels there's a significant savings there the other thing that they've done is they've allowed the homeowner a lot of autonomy in building their quotes out on their website and that's where i was mentioning earlier drone quotes moving in that direction as well we released a tool that's called what's my price the play on words there being watts of course that allows the homeowner to build out their own quote and remove the salesperson more from the transaction that does two things that allows you to get your quotes in a quicker manner and allows you to build them to your liking without having to wait on anybody and it also removes the person's time in building out that quote for you in most companies actually i would say 98 of solar companies out there that are giving you quotes when you're talking to the sales person and they're going back and forth on building their quotes it's taking up their time that they're not spending out selling a system with another party so by removing the sales person as much as possible from the as much as possible from the equation you're able to reduce the price tesla's done that very well and they've also increased customer autonomy with uh additional benefit of having the customer acquisition costs being lower for them so when the solar industry as a whole figures this out to a better degree you're going to see the cost of solar going down because as it stands today the cost of components is really about as low as it's going to get i can't imagine it going down too much more your costs are coming from acquiring the customer and from the sales person being involved in the middle yeah really good really good point and when you use a service like tesla and drone quote that's why i partnered with you guys you remove some of that overhead um it's a shame if you were a solar salesman i get that you know not everyone wins in transitions of technology but in the case of solar prices you can't you can't compete with when you don't have to pay that extra overhead also um you know there's differences in the size of companies and and how much overhead there is there and how many different you know people are supported by by the work of these companies so uh that's going to be there here's a quick question for you by the way before we switch gears um sorry yoga says you said that panels barely required cleaning how does that work with a more desert-like climate like arizona for example with more sand and way less rain to clean to clean it what have you found so in those cases it would be in your best interest that you pay attention to your monitoring one so you look at your monitoring on your mobile device and you could you could get a feel and i'm sure you would agree to this after you've had the system for a year what time of year is going to be better for you right you mentioned earlier on in our conversation so in a place like arizona where there is less rain and you know more dust being kicked up from you know what have you it would it would be in your best interest to schedule some sort of cleaning now the challenge is if you have a roof that's inaccessible or hard to access then to access you're going to be paying somebody for that cleaning so now what would have been your savings on electricity you're paying somebody to clean the roof or excuse me clean the panels and that's reducing your your monetary benefit so i think that in a place like arizona or texas or where there's a lot more um dust or debris if you're underneath the tree that's why i don't like trees as well not only the shade but the debris from the trees you're going to have to clean your panels more and that's going to come at a cost either of your time or your money yeah that's a good point one thing i do and this might not be possible if you have a bigger house if you take your garden hose with a nice high pressure nozzle on it and you know just get to a position where you can like point up on your on your panels and just wash them a little bit that alone i mean that does most of the job you're not going to get like more fine stuff and like bird poop and stuff like that's not going to come off probably but you'll get a lot of that dirt layer right off of there so if you have a two-story house i might be trickier but um the easiest way i think would be to do that because yeah paying someone to clean the panels that gets that that eats into your savings really quickly um you know do most people ever clean them i i actually want to say that most people probably never have cleaned their panels just hold them up there and let the reins whenever they come wash them and it's actually you know what um with the exception of knowing that you're not paying as much for it's easy to forget you have solar yeah because you i mean especially in your case right you come home and you don't pull up to your driveway and you don't see panels you know somebody that may see panels regularly they'll okay i have solar i can see them there but even then you kind of get used to it and you know you don't think about them so most people don't clean their panels for that reason all right this is a cool question i think you'll like cameron sauer says uh for sending away from drone quote are there any off the wall requests you've been able to accommodate off-the-wall requests um i mean the most recent one that comes to mind is we had so when drone quote does helps a homeowner buy solar we do a before and after drone survey right before the system's installed we get measurements with the drone of shade and the physical roof space and then we do a post installation uh survey to make sure that no tiles are cracked or that the system was installed the way it should have been installed and oftentimes well i shouldn't say oftentimes sometimes we catch things but um i've had a request just recently where somebody called us back over a year and said hey can you fly the drone over my roof again i just want to make sure the panels are good i thought that was a little strange because we had already shown them that they were you know good to go and that's the only thing that's coming to mind off the uh off the wall requests i remember there was a there was a gentleman who emailed you who wanted like panels installed in a weird location like hundreds of meters from his house or something remember that one there's been some there's probably been most probably i speak to so many different people um no i don't i don't remember them but you don't want to install your panels too far away from where you're going to be metering that electricity because there's a loss over a significant distance uh but now to answer the question more directly i other than this one example i just gave you i can't think of another off-the-wall request that comes to mind but i mean the point is if somebody had questions or had like a special need you'd sit down with them understand the nature of it and give them advice on how best to proceed that really is what people are looking for and this is part of why you know you've been written a lot i remember we made a video a year ago and i want to make it a yearly tradition that we should talk every year and i know people emailed you because i saw the comments there was tons of people with like unique questions for you and thank you for fielding them because part of it is first of all like there's just these weird questions that people have and they maybe they're like a little they don't know how to phrase it right or they don't know quite the question to to ask but if you can get people get started like hey look here's kind of the general basis that's what we've been doing today understand if it's right for you like how much you pay for electricity um do you own your house do you you know are you living for a long time are home values high where you live or you know all this kind of stuff once you have that second your particular questions if you have somebody who can answer them you just feel so much better and that's where you've come in and i really appreciate you always doing that um every time somebody has a question about solar i go hey um he'll take care of you thank you and i appreciate you always doing that yeah well you know i i it's our pleasure you know i want to make sure that we are offering value to people even if it means that you know we're not going to be doing business together that's okay because we're not going to win every single opportunity or not every single contact is going to be an opportunity but i do make it a point to be make ourselves available whether it's myself or anybody else on staff you know maybe riley maybe tara alina is probably the first point of contact that viewers will come into uh contact with she's you know who typically answers the phones but it's our responsibility between our staff to make sure that we are always being of service to people that reach out to us even if you know there is no business to be done because at the end of the day i want to make sure that i have not given anybody any opportunity to say anything negative about about drunk only positive things and that comes through you know being available doing the right thing exactly um let's see if there's any other any other questions so we have we have 10 minutes left guys and uh thank you all of you for joining we you know if there's if you guys have email um i'll put a link in the chat maybe i should do that should i um so email us there i'll pin this to the chat if you have any questions like specific questions about going solar email me at that address and we'll pass it along this anyway or whatever we got to do and you can you can ask questions and and and no there's no pressure you can i have people who email me there's one guy who's emailed me for like a year and a half i don't think he's ever bought solar he has no he just has all these questions about solar end that's fine you know that's fine i love i've always said i love solar i love talking about it i think it's one of those technologies that is transformative it gives you a sense of power and control i can make my electricity so happy to talk to people about that but we have about 10 minutes left so if there's any questions we can get to i'm happy to do so while we have you and there will be a follow-up episode where we're this is going to be a two-hour kind of rambling we had that little stumble in the middle but we will do a 30 20 or 20 20 30 minute like rapid fast like massively energy uh information danced video with senua where we'll answer all the questions of all the stuff that you got to know about going solar in 2021 so that video will come out maybe in a week or two as well trying to think of any last-minute value ads that i could add here hmm yeah think of something and we'll see if there's any questions uh dan says going full-time rving this year 2500 to 3 000 watts of solar wow that's a lot for a rv that's amazing it is and uh 13.5 kilowatt hours of lithium iron phosphate for storage uh dan you've pretty much described my dream setup i was i was shopping for rvs yesterday i kid you not um because i have a deep desire to you know take the family and do like a three months on the road thing get like a hot spot thing have solar have all that the the real challenge is i'd love to do it electric but we just don't have like my cyber truck isn't here yet so maybe i'll wait until then and get a fifth wheel or do an rv and maybe just live with a gas part rv for one last trip or something i don't know but i think it's really cool dan and i'd love to hear more about that when you have more information so ian uh asks will drone quote estimate uh for us here in vermont you guys operate in vermont no unfortunately we do not but that doesn't mean that i can't be of service to ian if he has any questions on the quotes that he has received we've done that countless times uh we will uh field any questions especially in a manner where there's no dog in the fight to give you the uh answers that you're looking for from uh a party that well there's no dog in the fight yeah exactly yeah because part of part of the drone quote model is establishing connections finding the best installers working with people so it takes some time but i mean tell me tell me i'm not wrong but you guys have grown your network massively since working with us right we've probably been giving you leads all around the place right we we have uh so when we started working with you guys that was uh in 2018 2019 2019 um that opened up uh the lead float through through you guys to an audience that involves just about every single state and even international people right so it just goes to show it just goes to show ricky how far your reach goes you know we've had people from uh you know canada is an easy country to name but germany from spain from australia that came across us through two-bit so i'm really fortunate that uh that we were able to build this connection for that reason but also you know on a more personal level you and i have become friends we've hung out um you know so i i appreciate that opportunity as well so it's been great yeah exactly um yeah i appreciate you guys for being on here uh this is this has been fun and i think what we could probably do senor is uh i get what i what i'm gonna start to do from now on is i get questions about solar all the time and i go oh that's a great question i'm gonna make a list and when the list gets big enough we'll have you back on we'll talk and answer some of these questions but it sounds like the audience here today is pretty pretty savvy they've got like junkers zian has mentioned you know he he enjoyed the live stream and he's clearly had solar for a long time and he kind of understands the ins and outs of it um so there's probably a good mix of people but there are some really good questions that i do get quite often cleaning is something that people have brought up in the past and i will say most people never pay for cleaning um i have seen some trucks starting to roll around you know like solar cleaning services and then i take a double take like what but i mentioned like a free market right when you have a need businesses will pop up if there's that's how that's how that's how it works so um that's good to know you know what if i could ask uh if i could do two things here real quick before we wrap up uh ricky uh the first of which is shameless plug right drone quote that way i've mentioned us a few times throughout our conversation um but i would really like the feedback of the audience on a marketing approach that we took with this tool that we released it's called what's my price is there a link i can i can put um i should know this off the top of my head uh there's a youtube video that we put out if you type in watts my price okay i'll pop the link into yeah and that's actually where i'm going with the feedback um i'm not gonna name any particular company names for the threat of lawsuit but if you guys check out the what's my price video and give me your feedback on that i would really appreciate that because we have a campaign around glow i'll leave it at that and uh we have a few other videos that we're working to release um and i would like to get your guys's feedback to see is there you want to share yeah you know what um info drone quote dotnet info dronecourt.net um and if you have a question for me specifically uh that is not as general info would be like a general solar question but uh drone quote uh excuse me s montoya s montoya dronecourt.net um if you have something specific for me but otherwise uh you know we have several people looking at the info email address and it'll be responded to a little bit quicker this is a live video and i'm i'm not at my office and i won't be for the next couple of days so i wouldn't be able to respond quickly potentially yeah don't worry yeah exactly and thank you for answering all the people who have emailed you with questions and stuff uh in the past junker mentions that you know fire safety shutoffs and stuff in california yeah i think we're starting to see the the effects of some of the the changes are happening to our climate in different places it manifests in different ways texas you know horrible stuff happening more hurricanes we have more hurricanes than ever before we don't have that in california we have fires and our fire seasons are going to get worse and worse and it doesn't take much to be without power and so we should probably start to be thinking about solar and batteries and somebody mentioned before if you have solar without batteries you don't have power when the power goes down you can't make electricity if even if it's shining the sun is shining it's the brightest day in the of the year does not matter your house will be without power like everybody else that's why i keep saying the 20s the next 10 years i want it to be about batteries because solar is well in hand we need to really figure out the storage part and that's going to be crucial um and and to your point so i put a link up above i'll pin the video up up um i can't pin two comments i guess but i can pin your video and give him his feedback on on his marketing campaign so i think the the comparison to the company will be clear but what's is it what's my price uh what's like uh solar watts w w watch my price or your what's watching yeah the what's my price is the tools so you know one of the things people do especially if you're a nerd and you're kind of figure out details is you go okay what if i got more panels but they were more efficient or i got less panels and you start to like change it around you don't have to deal with a person you got to keep calling going hey john could you change my order to this and tell me how much that cost that's no fun so to your point about what tesla has done made it all online to make it easy to visualize inside your way's doing the same thing with run quote and then what's my uh what's my price tool watts wtts what's my price tool helps you to pick a system resize it look at how things are are changing in real time and it's a it's a fascinating fun especially if you're a nerd way to see how can i what if i got two more panels just to be more ready for the future don't get an electric car or something you could do all that and have a good idea of of the price of of the system and if you have that tool it ties in nicely with you guys and you guys are in in sync with what the user is looking for yeah and it's accurate to the home so it's accurate to the orientation of your house it's accurate to the amount of shade that's on your roof it's accurate to the number of panels that actually fit on your roof so you're getting numbers that are applicable to you rather than you know just using a generic uh tool online that says you know this number of panels will produce this amount of electricity that's not specific to your home this is what's my price is listen ricky believe it or not what's my price was not trademarked i almost passed out from the excitement when i saw that it wasn't trademarked oh yeah of course and watsonmyprice.com we got it for 12 bucks man you gotta love it so cheryl says uh i'm the cat's out of the bag you know you're busted cheryl says i hope progressive insurance isn't upset with you about their commercials this is really this is really cool because this this tells you that eric watched this video from a year ago eric kessler mentions insinuate quote solar and batteries are like pb and j that was something you said a year ago in that video that's right yeah that's right eric ericka's earth my man thank you eric exactly i appreciate you eric i appreciate you yeah and if you have if you have ideas or like you know i i can mention i have extra solar panels i kind of want to build my own little battery if you guys are interested in like science experiments of kind of tackling some of these things like i mentioned put your panels westward-facing how would that look how would especially if you have time of use how would westward-facing panels compare with just putting your traditional south facing end so if you have questions like that let us know we'll do more videos i think it's wrap time to wrap this up thank you guys all for watching send you a huge thank you i know you're on travel i think you're like in a business center at the hotel where you're staying i am i am you can tell there's another computer right there but we made it work and um if you guys have questions and stuff you know write to us put you know his emails there i'll put it all into the into the live stream as well and thank you we we we will keep covering don't worry if you missed this or you're you have questions still i love solar we're going to talk more about it and there'll be much more to come thank you guys so much for watching enjoy the rest of your weekend it's saturday morning so best time of the day right you have the whole weekend forward too easter weekend yep yes happy easter all those observe and um we'll catch you guys soon thank you again anyway i appreciate you

Channel: Two Bit da Vinci

Views: 174,684

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Id: sHnaU9HKI58

Length: 112min 10sec (6730 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021