Solar Questions Homeowners Ask

Panels convert sunlight into direct current. An inverter converts that into the alternating current your house uses. Your home consumes whatever it can at that moment, and the surplus charges a battery or flows to the grid for a credit. The panels are the visible part; the inverter and your interconnection agreement determine how the system behaves day to day.

Yes, at reduced output. Panels respond to light rather than heat, so an overcast day produces a fraction of a clear one rather than nothing. Annual production estimates already account for typical cloud cover where you live.

A standard grid-tied system shuts down when the grid goes down. That is a safety requirement — it prevents your array energising lines utility crews may be working on. Riding through an outage needs a battery, an inverter configured for it, and the circuits you care about moved onto a backup subpanel.

Panels are the durable part of the system and carry long performance warranties, which guarantee output stays above a stated percentage of the original rating rather than promising the panels stop at the end. The inverter has a considerably shorter design life and is the component most likely to need replacing during the system’s life.

It charges a battery if you have one, and otherwise goes to the grid. What that is worth varies enormously: full retail under net metering, considerably less under net billing or an avoided-cost buyback rate. This single variable does more to decide whether solar pays than almost anything else.

Under full retail net metering, electricity you export is credited at the same rate you pay to import, so the meter effectively runs backwards. Many states and utilities have moved to net billing or buyback arrangements that credit exports below retail, which changes both the payback and the case for a battery.

We do not publish a national average and present it as your price, because a figure built from other people’s roofs, rates and incentives is an anchor rather than an estimate. What decides your price is system size, equipment, roof complexity, electrical work, local labour, permitting and how it is financed.

It depends on four things: your annual consumption, your usable roof, your retail electricity rate, and what your utility pays for exports. High retail rates and favourable export terms make solar work; cheap electricity and poor export compensation make it marginal. None of that is visible from the street, which is why anyone answering this without seeing your bill is guessing.

It is derived from your annual kilowatt-hours, then constrained by usable roof plane. Two households of the same size can differ by a factor of three, so the number in a national article is close to useless for your house.

Total system price divided by system size in watts. It exists so quotes for different sized systems can be compared. It is only meaningful when every quote is computed the same way — gross of incentives, on the same DC basis, with the battery excluded.

Usually something real: a string inverter instead of module-level electronics, a shorter workmanship warranty, subcontracted labour, or exclusions that reappear later as change orders. Ask what is different rather than assuming it is a better deal.

No, and a specific guarantee is a warning sign. Savings depend on future utility rates, your consumption, the weather and your tariff. A company promising a payback year is selling certainty it does not have.

Not for homeowners buying their own system. Section 25D, the residential clean energy credit, was terminated for expenditures made after 31 December 2025. It did not phase down — the 2025 budget act struck the end date and deleted the scheduled step-downs. Any proposal or article netting 30% off an owner-occupier’s price is working from rules that no longer apply.

Because it is a different credit, in a different part of the tax code, claimed by a different taxpayer. Under a lease or power purchase agreement the third-party owner holds the equipment and claims Section 48E. Whether any of that value reaches you depends on the terms you sign.

Incentives arrive in four layers — federal, state, utility and local — administered by four different bodies. We do not publish a programme table because we could not keep it current, and a stale table reads as current to everyone who finds it. Check each layer against its own administrator.

Usually not. Most tax credits are claimed on your return after the fact, so you pay the full price first. Some utility rebates are assigned to the installer and appear as a discount. Ask which of the two any figure in your proposal is — the cash-flow consequences are very different.

Storage makes financial sense where export compensation is poor or where time-of-use rates vary sharply through the day, and practical sense where outages are frequent or long. Where exports still earn close to retail and the power rarely fails, a battery is often the weakest part of a proposal.

Only if it was designed and paid for to do that. By default a battery powers a defined set of circuits on a backup subpanel, chosen during installation. Capacity decides how long it runs; the power rating decides what it can run at once, and it is the second number that determines whether your air conditioner starts.

You can, and usually you should not. Panels are warranted for roughly twenty-five years, so a roof with under about ten years left will need replacing underneath the array — which means paying to remove and reinstall it. Doing the roof first is almost always cheaper.

A string inverter is one unit handling the whole array, which is cheaper and means a shaded panel can drag down everything on its string. Microinverters and optimisers sit under each module, so panels work and report independently. On a shaded or multi-plane roof the difference is worth paying for.

In most climates with regular rain and a pitched array, not really. Cleaning earns its cost in long dry seasons, near agricultural or road dust, under heavy pollen, where birds roost, and on near-flat arrays that shed nothing. Check your own production data before paying for it.

Verify the licence in the name on the contract, get proof of insurance, establish who physically performs the work, and read all three warranties separately. Then get comparable written proposals on the same system size and production basis. The equipment is largely commoditised; the company is not.

Search your state licensing board register for the exact legal entity on the contract and confirm the licence is current. Solar licensing is inconsistent across the US — some states license it as a speciality, some fold it into electrical, some do not license it at all — so a search returning nothing often means you searched the wrong register.

Product warranties on panels and inverters are held by the manufacturers and usually survive, though you may have to arrange and pay the labour to fit a replacement part. The workmanship warranty generally does not survive unless it is backed by a third party. Independent service companies will work on systems they did not install.

Same-day-only pricing, door-to-door contracting, guaranteed savings, a net price with no gross figure, refusal to name panel and inverter models, and a large deposit with no progress schedule. None prove bad work; all are designed to stop you comparing.

No. We publish no ranking, score or badge, because we have no objective documented methodology that would support one. We tell you what to check and you decide. Verification is not endorsement.

The question underneath all four is whether you end up owning the system. Ownership decides who claims the incentives, who carries maintenance, and how straightforward the house is to sell. Cash costs least overall; a lease or PPA moves the upfront cost and the maintenance to someone else, at the price of not owning the asset.

A fee paid to a lender so a below-market interest rate can be offered, recovered by raising the cash price and financed along with everything else. It is rarely shown as its own line. Ask for the cash price and the financed price as separate numbers — the gap is the fee.

Evidence is generally favourable for owned systems. Leased systems and PPAs are more complicated, because the agreement has to be assumed by the buyer or settled at closing, and that is a negotiation rather than a formality.

Yes, and the financing structure decides how easily. An owned system transfers with the house. A loan with a UCC-1 filing, a lease or a PPA each have to be paid off, subordinated or assumed before closing. Find out which you have months before you list, not a week before completion.

Work outward from the cheapest explanation. Monitoring showing zero is most often a communications fault rather than a dead array — a replaced home router is a common cause. Check whether your meter shows export before assuming a generation problem. Never go on the roof or open an enclosure: a live DC array is dangerous in daylight regardless of breaker position.

No. We do not install, finance, maintain or service solar systems, we have no crews and no equipment, and we never visit your property. We publish information and, when a homeowner asks, we can help connect them with solar professionals serving their area.

The intended model is that solar professionals pay to receive homeowner enquiries. That is the business, and you should read everything on this site knowing it. What that money does not buy is placement in a guide, a favourable comparison, the removal of a warning, or a mention in our research.

We check the request is complete and look for professionals covering your area and the kind of work you described. If we find them, your details go to them and they contact you. If we do not, we tell you that rather than holding your details indefinitely. Nothing is routed until you consent on the final step.

No. Your details are used to respond to your enquiry and to match you with solar professionals serving your area, with your consent. They are not sold to data brokers or advertising networks. The privacy policy sets out retention and your rights in full.

Primary sources: federal agency data, state agency rules, utility filings and manufacturer documentation. Most of our state-level analysis is computed by us from Form EIA-861, the annual census every US electric utility must file. Where a figure is our arithmetic rather than a published statistic, the page says so.