I've had Solar for 10 Years - Here's The Thing...

in june of 2011 i got solar panels installed on my house not just to save money but as a science experiment now ten years later i'd like to share everything i've learned through this journey with all of you i spent ten thousand dollars on my system before incentives and in the past 10 years so much of my life has changed i'm on my second refrigerator my third car i got married i have two kids yet these 10 year old solar panels have been a beacon of consistency but it's not entirely sunshine and rainbows so in this time what have i learned what do i wish i knew before i made this decision running this channel i have seen thousands of your common questions and comments about solar so i thought those lessons deserved a deeper dive here on tupa davinci so let's break those down into some major categories i'll even add chapters so you can jump around based on what you're curious about let's talk about my system hardware what type of panels i went with inverters that sort of thing dig into the data and see just what my system has done in 10 years total system cost incentive break even period then let's talk about prices and how it's changed in 10 years then we'll talk about total cost of maintaining a system over 10 years what is really needed what kind of cleaning or other kind of upkeep do you need to do then we'll talk about system reliability and whether i've had any issues or other problems with my panels or inverter any warranty claims and then finally we'll wrap it up and talk about our conclusions all the pros and cons and all the stuff i've learned stuff i wish i had known before i got started and if i think it's worth it and what i think you should know before you go solar alright so first let's talk about the system specifics and dig a little deeper into what i chose to do people make the mistake of assuming the price per watt of a panel is the full system price but here in the us we always talk about solar in terms of the full blown cost panels inverters the labor the hardware everything and so that is the price per watt number that we'll use in this video i have five 235 watt solar panels from a company called silicon that was recommended to me by my installer but they didn't exactly give me all that many other choices the problem with that is that the company silicon has since gone bankrupt and as a result will not honor my 30-year warranty on these panels so if anything happens to me in the next 20 years i'm 100 on my own next up i have enphase m215 micro inverters now i should probably spell out the options you have when choosing an inverter an inverter is a critical part of your solar system the panels produce dc electricity which is combined and sent to the inverter to then get inverted to ac or alternating current for your house the only exception to this would be if you have a home battery which is also dc so the solar would feed right into the battery you wouldn't be watching tuba davinci videos without the obligatory science lesson wait i promise i'll make this fun and you'll probably learn a thing or two about electrical engineering first let's talk about voltage and current if you look at a solar panel you'll see it's made up of rows and columns of photovoltaic cells residential panels are typically six by ten for total of sixty cells while commercial panels can be six by twelve or even eight by twelve each cell has its own positive and negative lead just like a battery but clearly we need to combine each individual cell together to make an entire panel if we wire them in parallel that means we take the negative leads and wire them all together and the positive leads and wire those all together if we do that the end result is that we will have the same system voltage but the current will increase as the number of cells increases if each of the cells has a voltage of 0.7 volts and a current of 7 amps then wiring them in parallel would result in a panel with 0.6 volts and 504 amps this is a really bad idea because systems at higher voltages are typically more efficient and because 500 amps would require some seriously thick and heavy wire to carry that's why solar panel makers wire individual cells in series in series each positive lead is wired to the next cell's negative lead and so on and so forth in series the current doesn't change but the voltage adds up so now we'd have a panel with a voltage of 50 volts and a current of 7 amps that's much better but there is one drawback to wiring things in series and that's shading if shading falls on a cell in parallel it doesn't affect the other cells but in series it does now that we have one individual panel all wired up let's extend this analogy to the entire system of panels the first consideration here is a choice of inverter most solar systems have a string inverter one massive inverter that will take the input from all of your panels inverted to dc the other option would be micro inverters where instead of one big inverter you place small micro inverters under each and every solar panel alright so the benefits of a string inverter they're much cheaper traditionally if repairs are needed it's easy to access because it's typically in your garage if you have a home battery you can bypass the inverter and just charge directly to the battery using dc so now for the cons the first is a shorter service life between 10 and 15 years and that's because they're dealing with a huge amount of current the entire solar panel system's worth so as a result it gets hotter systems tend to fail sooner if the inverter fails your entire system is out of producing electricity so it's a one point failure inverter goes down your entire solar system is doing nothing since panels would be wired in series shading on one panel will hurt output from all the other panels so depending on where you live shading is going to either be a big deal or not i have tall trees pretty much 360 degrees around me so shading was a major consideration for where i placed my panels this is a consideration if you're going the string inverter because based on the inverter's working input range installers will wire your panels into groups of series and parallel to achieve the correct voltage but don't worry if you have lots of trees or shading sources there is a device called a power optimizer that you can add under each panel to help with this with the power optimizer you have the benefits of a micro inverter where shading on one panel won't hurt the others but now you do have more hardware because well now you have something under every panel and a master string inverter at the bottom of the house as well in contrast micro inverters are many instead of one the pros here would be that shading on one panel has no impact on any other that's because each and every solar panel is working by itself because each inverter only deals with one panel currents are lower and the micro inverter can last about 25 years or more my end phase system has a 25 year warranty so far 10 years in they're perfect also if one micro inverter fails well you just lose the output from that one panel the rest of your system is unaffected unlike in the string inverter case all right so now for the cons price typically microinverters are more expensive because if you have 20 solar panels you need 20 micro inverters though not always because if you have to get solar optimizers because of shading for your string inverter those costs might add up so be sure to ask those questions to your installer and make sure you factor all that in and if there is a failure well now you have to get on your roof and deal with a solar panel it's much harder to work on than it is on an string inverter in your garage and lastly if you have a home battery then you'll be inverting dc from the panels to ac to dc again to charge the battery which is what i'm doing for my tesla powerwall and it's not exactly ideal because now we have two inversion operations and so you're losing efficiency at both of them unless you get an absolutely massive system you're probably only need one string inverter but if you opt instead for micro inverters you'll need as many inverters as you have panels this gets into some of the tough questions you probably have should i get more efficient more expensive panels and get less of them or get less costly panels and get more of them really it's a question of how big a roof is and some other things well i'm happy to say there's finally some really good calculators out there provided by our sponsor drone quote drone quote and its founder are very good friends of the channel and i'm happy to report that dozens of our viewers have gone solar through drone quote in the past few years drone quote just came up with its what's my price tool that helps you modify your system in real time to answer questions just like this about more expensive versus cheaper panels they also recently released an ev calculator that based on your model and yearly driving will tell you just how many panels you should consider to offload even your driving with solar try doing that with a gas car i probably get asked about once a week from my friends and family about solar and well when i have questions senui the founder of drone quote is the person i turn to what i love about droneco is that they remove the part about solar that i hate most the sales people just sign up and drone quote will have a licensed drone pilot survey your roof so they can come up with the best solar design and minimize shade with their brand new what's my price tool you can tinker with adding more panels or change the type of panels on their website without having to talk to somebody and ask them to rerun calculations i love this this allows you to answer all those kinds of questions and say what happens if i want to add four more panels because i want to get a hot tub later this year and want to make a little more energy than i think i do today it helps you answer all that right in front of you in real time once you make your final decision they reach out to get bids from the top rated solar installers where you live making them compete for your business so if you're thinking about going solo or just have some questions reach out to senuai from drone quote and get started today if you use our link in the description drone quote dot net slash two bit you'll get our special rates thank you drone code as always for being sponsored of the channel okay next let's dig into my 10 years of data first i have to make a disclaimer there were two periods here you'll see in the charts while i was remodeling parts of my house where i didn't have the monitoring because i didn't remember to plug it back in i have five end phase m215 micro inverters that will communicate with a gateway to store all my data on the cloud within phase monitoring is included for free for life most other systems like solaredge have something similar but ask your installers to make sure because monitoring your energy production each day is one of the great joys of going solar especially if you're a data nerd like me by looking at the best day of output in september a famously sunny month here in san diego in 2011 and in 2020 we can reduce variables like cloudiness and dust in the air as much as possible the results are as follows the average output after 10 years for the five panels is 90.6 percent but the best panel was 92.6 and the worst was 86.2 percent honestly these numbers are pretty much in alignment with my expectations and i didn't clean the panels during this time which would have helped a little bit but if i had to guess that 186 panel might degrade further than the 80 guarantee after 25 years but as i mentioned before this gets into the bad news my solar panel company silicon and the installers all seasons have both gone belly up so guess what i'm on my own this gets to the double-edged sword that is solar what else in your life would you keep for 25 years so when picking the brand of panels keep this in mind sure maybe this company that you've never heard of might be cheaper but are they as likely to be around in 25 years as let's say lg or sun power the same goes for the installers the smaller the company the fewer miles to feed and the lower the cost the larger the company there's more overhead and so prices will probably be higher but which is going to be around when you need them but let me just say this this fact doesn't bother me at all because even if that one really bad panel completely stopped working i could get up on my roof and swap in a brand new 400 watt panel in its place in about 20 minutes i do have easy access to my roof a one-story house and a fearless love for being on my roof and looking on my panels if all of that isn't really who you are you'd have to factor this in just remember that panels are getting better and better all the time so don't feel the pressure to get the absolute best panel today as odds are an average panel in five to eight years will outperform it in case you're wondering about tesla solar it can prove a great option as well but remember that they will require you to couple it with a powerwall home battery with your system which is going to add to the cost also tesla's still growing so they may not serve your area they might have long wait times and other things like that this gets to my advice which has remained the same from 2011 to today i personally don't like huge loans and debts and that's why my first system 10 years ago was 10 000 it was the maximum amount i was willing to spend i added to my system in 2020 upping it from 1.2 kilowatt to 5.3 kilowatt with 12 350 watt panels now i power my house all my driving with my tesla model 3 for less than what i used to spend on one gasoline fill up i used to fill up between three to four times and spend about 200 on gasoline and another 150 to 200 on my house now i pay less than 50 for everything including all the baseline fees which you can't get rid of no matter how hard you try and so now this gets into our buy buy-back period how long did it take me to recoup my cost and in my case it was eight years and nine months based on how much my bills went up over the last 10 years they have gone up significantly i remember complaining about 38 cents a while ago and now from 4 to 9 p.m i'm paying 56 cents per kilowatt hour i believe here in san diego it is absolutely absurd but that's kind of the thing is i think energy prices will always keep on rising and this is a way to kind of offset that now eight years and nine months is a really long recoup time but the good news is here in 2021 and going forward that number is significantly less and that's because now today for ten thousand dollars i could probably get a system around three point eight almost four kilowatts or so and that would recoup itself especially with our higher prices much much faster i have a calculator that i've built in the past that i'm going to share so check in the video description for that and in that i'll let you put in things like how much you pay for electricity you know how much your utility charges you how much sunshine you get based on where you live which is something you can find out and see if your recoup time is within five years or so and whatever makes sense for you that calculator should help you to understand exactly what your break-even point would be if you look at the data here you'll see that there's a seasonal trend i make way more electricity in the summer time obviously the days are longer and less in the winter time there's also some fun facts and some questions i've had that i'm just going to go through really quickly here one of them is if you live in the northern hemisphere as most people do then you're going to want south facing panels and that's because the sun will be pretty high in the sky almost vertically above you in the summertime and it'll fall lower and lower into the sky in the winter time so that's why you want to put your panels on the south part of your roof because if you put on the north part of your roof especially in the winter time your roof is actually going to block the sh and cast straight on your panels and that's not what you want also time of use is the big new thing you've probably been hearing about if you have time of use billing that means that you pay for electricity based on the time of day and if that's the case you might want to break out some of your panels on the west facing part of your roof and the reason for that is they're not going to make as much energy during the full part of the day but as the sun is setting after 4 pm like 4 5 6 pm at night those panels would be making way more electricity at a more expensive part of the day so for me if i had west facing panels which i currently don't i could be making electricity at the 50 cent price you know at four o'clock compared to maybe only 25 cents during the noon periods and that's because solar is kind of cyclical that way it doesn't make power all day so next let's talk about maintenance what i've paid a maintenance cost happy to report 10 years have gone by i have spent zero dollars on maintenance what i typically do when i remember and i'm not gonna lie there's probably been years where i didn't do anything but i try to get up on the roof with like a mop or something and clean my panels about once a year maybe twice a year some years i've done it zero times and what i found is you get about a five percent boost in production that's like when they're really dirty and you clean them you'll see about a five percent increase and that's really all about it because you got to remember that naturally the rains fall if you have rain where you live san diego we can have about eight month periods of no rain it'll naturally clean the panels off and also as the dirt builds up the wind will take it off there's only so much dirt that can build on the panels typically i do live on a one-story roof house though so if you have a two-story house and getting up on the roof to clean your panel that's not in the cards honestly i'd say don't bother don't worry about it if you really want to to try it out there are companies now i've seen trucks that will come out and clean your panels although the minute you do that and you're spending hundreds of dollars to clean your panels you're eating into the profit that you had from the panel so i would say typically probably not worth cleaning unless you want to do it like once every couple of years to get a really deep clean to then uh go from there and i and i should probably mention don't do anything you're not comfortable doing being on a roof solar panels heights all that kind of stuff is scary so it's up to you to do what you do of course is for entertainment only so be safe up there if you do do something like that otherwise don't bother and hire the professionals i am not advising you to do anything dangerous or scary at all for sure finally one more point i want to touch on is the battery aspect of solar one thing you might not know is that if you don't have a battery system for your house and you have solar when the power goes out you're not making power you might be thinking it's noon the sun is shining why is my house in the dark and the reason is because as a safety measure the minute the grid is down the solar panels will stop outputting to the grid like the inverter senses the grid says there's no grid and it stops it'd be nice if they could power your house and not just the grid but that's just not how it works so as a result you will not have power the only way to have electricity in a power outage is to have a home battery i have a tesla powerwall i will link all my videos to the powerwall i have calculators for the powerwall and payoff periods and stuff i've done all that in the past i'll put links to a ton of stuff the description of this video will be chock full of information so take a look around i odds are if there's a question about solar batteries it'll be there but the power wall is probably another ten thousand dollar commitment there are bundling deals with tesla lg has some batteries there's some other companies that are providing batteries as well and if you have one of these batteries well then your solar will first and foremost charge the battery up during the day and then for me 4 to 9 pm i mentioned is really peak and expensive times so my power wall actually runs my entire house from 4 to 9 pm to the utility it's like i'm not home because my home does not use any energy from 4 to 9 pm saves me a lot of money especially in the summertime on my bill but most importantly it does a couple of things the first is here in california we have so much solar that we actually waste it at high noon for example when it's really hot that's because we have so much more production than we need and so little at 5 or 7 or 8 p.m when we are all coming home and using appliances and stuff and this gets to one of the things if you're getting solar to save money on your bills a battery's probably not on your on your radar and i get that that's totally fine if you're doing this for emergency preparedness and being prepared for like a power outage you got to go battery right of course and if you're doing it for the environment you got to go battery because what the power wall does to my house is when there's a ton of sunshine it charges my battery and then outputs to the grid whatever i'm not using from in my house and then after the sun starts going down i then have my power wall power my house not the grid so my pull or my draw on the grid has completely been flattened when there's extra i store it and then when there's a peak when the sun goes down i use my battery reserve and as a result the strain on the grid is flattened and stabilized and that's what batteries do otherwise what you'll see is way too much energy at noon because we have all the solar panel output and then nowhere near enough later and that could be a nightmare if you're a grid operator because how do you know how do you run a power plant that way you can't just turn on and off nuclear plants you have to deal with peaker power plants which are really dirty typically natural gas and if you want to get around all that you got to go battery so that pretty much wraps it up for us i have had my panels for 10 years i freaking love them they are something that i still get great joy out of i log into my dashboard to check their output even to this day 10 years later and they have been freaking bulletproof there's no other piece of equipment i've bought that has lasted 10 years probably like they have and they all look really good i will say that that one panel i think will degrade more quickly i can see kind of a little bit of a crack underneath the glass but 86 after 10 years is not bad at all it's producing energy as we speak and for the last two years or so a year and a half i'm in the black they're actually they paid for themselves and now they're saving me money and the rate of savings continues to go up as our home prices and our home electricity prices go up so i love it and i am so glad that i made this decision to be honest the five panels i bought 10 years ago were kind of the kickstart for this entire youtube channel and this entire journey so i will continue to share how they're doing over time in 10 more years i plan on making a 20 years of solar video to see how they fared i want to keep them around just to really understand how good they last amazing stuff so hopefully that covers it and i want to tell you again if you have any questions that we haven't covered here we're going to put the information for senua from drone quote the man is a walking treasure trove of knowledge about solar and drone quote is a great option for you if you're really wanting to get lots of prices and no high pressure sales people so that pretty much does it for me here with tuba davinci thank you so much for watching as we mentioned tons of videos and calculators will be provided in the description check out our channel for other videos we think you'll probably like if you want to be a rock star supporter of this show please consider joining our tribe the two bit tribe which is our patron supporters on patreon and our youtube channel members these are the people who have access to our discord who help us research topics who we all chat with on a daily basis and you help make this show possible you've probably heard i'm full time now that is a little bit scary but your support there would go a long ways for me thank you so much this is ricky with tuba davinci and just remember the future is going to be awesome

Channel: Two Bit da Vinci

Views: 2,835,265

Keywords: solar energy, small solar panels for beginners, solar panels for home, solar panels for home cost, solar panels for home reviews, solar panels, solar panels worth it, solar panels worth it or not, are solar panels worth it, solar panel system for home, solar power system for home, solar panel system, is solar worth it, solar power, is solar power worth it, solar installation, tesla solar, going solar, Getting Solar Panels, Going Solar in 2022, I've had Solar for 10 Years

Id: PXk5AFH2LaY

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021