Is solar worth it?
I wish I could answer that for you. my grandmother has asked me to look into solar for her house, she lives in San diego and pays way too much for power. Ontop of that I fear the whole rolling blackout thing that hits them every now and then during the summer, she is old and needs to have the A/c and lights when it's night.
My problem with the solar thing is do you pay for it yourself and do a battery bank system or just tie into local lines and get credits, or have a company install for basically free ( they then get the tax credits and own your roof for the next 20 years.
One thing I found was you can put something like a inverter switch when installing the system that would allow you to basically cut the feed to the grid. This would be particular useful during the power outages because you could then run a few items while the power company fixes the problem. Without the inverter you could not receive power to your house from your own panels during a outage because the power company would not allow any private systems to collect power do to the fact that men will be working with the lines and could possibly be burnt by the flow of power from a resident. So to make it completly safe for their workers they cut all sources of power until the problem is fixed.
Next thing that I'm just not to sure of is the fact that solar collection and the panels they use are something like 1970's technology. Maybe they have improved some sense then but nothing like they should have and so I would be concerned on investing 20-30 thousand for a system to have it be outdated in the next what? 5-10 years? I just don't know...I've heard of new ways of collecting the Rays but have yet to see any mass production of a system that's effective not only in terms of harnessing the sun but saving on the cost and resources it takes to produce such a thing.
So I'm still in my infant stages of understanding and still learning what's going on in the solar field, so please if I may have mentioned something wrong or just not true and anyone out there has better info please share with us.
As for my grandma, I'm leaning toward maybe having a generator installed that would run off the natural gas line that is fed to her house something like generac?. That way I could sleep better at night knowing she would pretty much always have the light turn on when she flips that switch.
