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BriDub's avatar

I didn't realize the customer was the thing being sold in most home solar deals.

I feel like that's the financial story of the early 21st C: people thought they were buying things, but they were actually being sold.

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Scott G's avatar

I've just started the solar journey for my home and I was definitely there with you about the whole used car salesman aspect.

I first looked at Google's Project Sunroof https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/ but I wanted another guesstimate... Filling out Google's form didn't seem to trigger the bullhorn, but the second place I looked certainly did. Over the next 36 hours I got no less than 8 different companies looking to give me a free estimate, if I give them an hour or so of my time for a "consultation". I took some of them up on it, until I just ran out of free hours to schedule for them.

Then, almost all... no, actually *all* of them wanted to size a system that would just barely cover my current utility bill and then they all sent me a first quote as a loan structured such that the loan payment would be the same as my current utility bill. It's as if they all think that we want to pay our utility bill still, but just to a loan company instead of the power company.

I've decided against battery system for now, especially after one particularly honest solar sales guy didn't even suggest a battery system and I asked him why (because the other guys were all listing battery on their quotes as an option, at least). He said that we'd pay $14k-16k for a battery that would only run our house for about 1 day in a outage. Around here, we mainly have outages related to ice and snow, and those haven't been very frequent, maybe 1-2 days total over the last 8 years. So he didn't even suggest to pay $8k / day for something I'd use maybe twice a decade.

Oh, and The Peripheral !!! Can't wait for season two now. But I wish they'd gone ahead and broken Ep8 into two parts to give it some more story time to make it a little less confusing. I needed to go online for some more explanation of the last half hour.

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