for the good time Jerry’s ramblings…

Stephanie forwarded an email to us about One Block Off the Grid, an organization that purchases and installs solar in bulk, ostensibly passing the savings on to you.

I had thought a bit about solar before, but never seriously, because I didn’t want to lay out a ton of money only to find out that Oregon really doesn’t get enough sun or that our house just isn’t well situated. Katie and I thought that we should put a modified solar calculator on the roof over a the year and see what we get. Thankfully, the solar industry is a little more advanced than we are.
I signed up for One Block Off the Grid literature, but meanwhile did some searching on my own – is solar really viable in Oregon? I found solaroregon.org which is a valuable resource for everything solar in Oregon. The first question, of course, is whether or not Oregon gets enough sun. What matters is solar radiation, and Portland gets plenty to be viable for solar.

OK, so solar is viable, now how much does it cost? I found this cool calculator off the Energy Trust web site. Now, after a little research, I so happen to know that it costs about $8/KW to install solar. I also know that installing a system whose total cost is > $20K actually hurts the financial picture. So, let’s choose a 2.4KW system at $8/KW. It reports the total cost to you: $10,620. That will produce about 2700KWh for the entire year. Assuming $0.10/KWh, that’s about $270/year. $10,620/$270 = 39.3 years. Yikes. You wouldn’t want to do this just to save money!

At this point, I had written solar off. But, I saw that SolarOregon offered classes on solar installation at the EcoTrust building downtown, so Katie and I signed up.

The class itself wasn’t all that infomative. We learned a few things, but mostly the information just confirmed what was already on the SolarOregon website. Probably the most important detail that I got out of it: if you install a 2.5KW system, you will get about 2500KWh of energy out of it each year.

After the class, we got to talking to one of the commercial solar installers, Alex Aldrich of REC Solar, Inc. As it turns out, Alex grew up on Paloma St., so we hit it off well. We asked Alex about the viability of solar at our house, and he said that the trees of Mt Tabor would probably hurt us, but he would come by and take a look.

When he arrived, he had a device kind of like this one, except that it was entirely digital. Using reflection of nearby objects and a little computer smarts, it is able to map out your solar insolation over the entire year.

Unfortunately, his findings were that we did not meet the minimum ‘efficiency’ requirements for a big chunk of the solar rebates, and therefore installation is much more expensive for us.

But, the exciting punch line, at least for me: a 2.5KW system (that’s 2500KWh/year), installed in a location that gets good sun, actually costs $3500 total ($13600 out of pocket minus tax incentives). It actually pays for itself!, and the value added to your home is probably equivalent to the cost.

If you have ever thought about going solar, I would highly recommend giving Alex a call and talking to him about options. Personally, I would not wait for One Block Off the Grid because you never know how long the government incentives will last, and furthermore Alex claims that the economy of scale that One Block Off the Grid claims to tap into has mostly been realized by REC Solar already.