Understand Solar. See What It Could Look Like for Your Home.

A standard grid-tied system shuts down in an outage. That is a safety requirement, not a fault — it stops your array energising lines that utility crews may be working on. Keeping power during an outage needs a battery and an inverter configured for it, and even then it powers a defined set of circuits rather than the whole house.

Your workmanship warranty is only as good as the company behind it, so that cover may effectively disappear. Product warranties on the panels and inverter are held by the manufacturers and usually survive, though you may have to arrange and pay for the labour to fit a replacement part. Independent solar service companies will work on systems they did not install.

Modules on your roof convert sunlight into direct current. An inverter converts that to the alternating current your house uses. Your home consumes what it can in real time, and anything left over charges a battery or goes to the grid for a credit set by your utility. The panels are the visible part; the inverter and the interconnection agreement are what determine how the system behaves day to day.

There is no single national answer, and a figure quoted without your roof, your usage and your utility attached is not information you can act on. Price is driven by system size, local labour and permitting costs, equipment tier, roof complexity, any electrical upgrades, and whether storage is included. For real installed-price data rather than an estimate, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Tracking the Sun and NREL’s cost benchmark are the two public datasets worth reading.

Modules are typically warranted to still produce a specified percentage of their rated output at 25 years, and they usually keep producing after that at a gradually declining rate. The inverter is the component most likely to need replacing first, since inverter warranties are commonly much shorter than module warranties. Ask for both warranty terms in writing — they are separate documents and separate lengths.

Yes, at reduced output. Panels respond to available light, so an overcast day produces a fraction of a clear day rather than nothing. What matters for the economics is not any single day but the annual total, which is why production estimates are modelled over a year using local weather data.

No. A grid-connected system works without one. A battery becomes worth considering when your utility pays little for exported power, when evening electricity is priced higher than midday electricity, or when you want specific circuits to stay live during an outage. It is a separate purchase with its own economics, and it should be evaluated on its own terms rather than bundled into the solar decision by default.

The physical installation on a typical home is measured in days. The overall timeline is usually measured in weeks to months, and it is dominated by design, permitting, inspection and the utility’s permission to operate — none of which the crew on your roof controls. An installer with recent experience in your jurisdiction is the single biggest lever on that timeline.

Get at least three written proposals built on the same assumptions, then compare the documents rather than the presentations. Check licensing for solar work in your state, workmanship coverage separately from equipment warranties, the specific module and inverter models quoted, the production estimate and how it was produced, and the financing terms behind the headline price. Local permitting experience and a service presence near you matter more in year seven than the sales pitch does in week one.

That depends on your state, your utility and sometimes your city, and it changes. The most reliable public index is DSIRE, maintained by the NC Clean Energy Technology Center, which tracks federal, state, utility and local programmes. Your utility’s own tariff documents are the authority on export compensation. We do not list current incentive amounts here because they go stale faster than a page can honestly carry them.

You can, but the sequence matters. An array is designed to sit on the roof for decades, so re-roofing later means paying to remove and reinstall it. If the roof covering is near the end of its life, replacing it first is usually cheaper than doing it twice. A competent installer will raise this before quoting; if nobody asks about the age of your roof, that tells you something.

It is worth it when the net cost, after anything you genuinely qualify for, is recovered by the bill savings within a period you are comfortable with — and when you expect to be in the house long enough to see it. The inputs that decide this are your annual usage, your electricity rate, your roof, your utility’s export rules and the price you are quoted. Anyone who answers this question without those five things is guessing.