Northern California Real Estate Agent: Stop paying your energy bills

Solar panels, why should you get them? Are they a good investment? And will you see the value when you go to sell your home? All that and more after this. Thanks for joining us on our video blog. Again, this is Andrew Lam, team leader of the lam team at ReMaxGold and joined here by Rick Davis today with Revolve Solar to talk about a couple of questions involving solar panels and you know, should I get them? How much are they, how much do they save me and are they a good investment? Of course, we want to direct your attention to two spots on the blog. Number one being if you're a home buyer, you can click the search all homes link and that will direct you to basically a backstage pass to the MLS to view all homes, all property descriptions and photos and, you know, interior exterior, plat maps, all of that. And if you're a home seller, please feel free to take use of our free home value link that will give you an immediate value of your home and also show you every recent sale in the area as well as active listings so you can compare yourself. Now we are joined by Rick Davis with Revolve Solar and we are going to be talking about a couple of frequently asked questions that we're getting from our clients. Lately it seems like solar has exploded this year. I've actually heard from a lot of companies that they've sold more solar contracts in the last six months than the last three years combined.

So that kind of growth rate, investment tax credits, some of the big economics behind solar are expiring soon. So there's quite a rush to make sure you get your solar discounted.

But the question generally is, is it worth looking into how much will solar panels actually save me? Do you know of an average savings per household?

It really varies from household to household. It has to do with how much unshaded roof space do you have that's optimal for Sol Solar, what your own electric demand is. So, you know, small house, big house, that sort of thing. So that's going to have a big impact. What we tend to focus on are, you know, is there a financing structure that allows the homeowner to be cash flow positive immediately, meaning day one, year one, you're making money. You haven't technically then come out of pocket at all. You're saving money immediately and whatever the length of that financing structure may be, you know, you're making money throughout that.

Okay, so you mentioned making money. How would someone make money off of the solar panels they purchased?

What we do in our approach is to spend quite a bit of time typically with the homeowner and learn more about them and what their sort of financial situation is and come up with the financing structure that's best for them that's going to save them the most money. But yeah, they should. Everybody should be saving money or you shouldn't be doing it. I mean there's clearly some environmentally positive things about doing solar, but it begins and ends on the money saving with revolve.

So. Well, part of that savings comes from the fact that California, thanks to our governor, is a net gain, net metering.

That's exactly right.

So can you explain kind of what that means?

Yeah, no, that's a tremendously positive element for California homeowners. The way the utilities are required to treat solar is that you are not only producing power with your solar panels that offsets what your normal usage would have been. But typically the way solar is designed, you actually over produce more than you need during the day. The utility credits you for that. Almost serves as your battery backup, if you will. They take what you're producing and over producing on your house that you didn't need. They sell it to your neighbor, all within the grid, but they credit you for that at a retail very high rate. So that at night, when clearly you're not offsetting with solar, no solar being created at night, you in essence have banked all those credits during the day and use that to offset the bills for the electricity that you use at night. It's an extremely powerful economic tool for the solar purchase. And yeah, California is fortunate to have that structure in place.

Well, for a free, obviously no risk, no obligation solar assessment, definitely feel free to make use of the link below or just reach out by phone or online to revolve solar. And thank you again for joining us on our video blog. If you have any questions at all that we haven't answered so far or just any comments on your current solar solution, please feel free to send us an email or leave a comment here and we'd be happy to chat with you and answer any questions you have. Thanks and have a great day.