My Roof and Solar System in 1 Minute
We live on a small 3 acre orchard farm and pump our water from a low productivity and sometime erratic well that accounts for much of our electricity use (average 40 kWh per day). Our typical monthly electricity bill was $300.
We have net metering here in California. So you want to produce almost what you use over a year. If you overproduce the electric utility must buy the excess, but PG&E only pays a few cents per kWh which is generally not worth it. Sonoma Clean Power, the local energy aggregator, will credit you full price plus 1 cent for your excess generated electricity.
Because of the net metering there's little reason to have a battery system for residential energy storage yet unless you need backup power for grid outages. (Without the battery system and associated isolation circuitry the solar system must shut down for safety during power outages.) But we haven't had much problem with power outages -- maybe two times last year which was very wet. PG&E is supposed to be more aggressive with preemptive grid shutdowns to prevent wildfires. We also have a 2700 gallon water storage tank which functions as a battery in a sense.
We were ideal candidates for residential rooftop solar.
At that time Tesla claimed to be introducing a new tile roofing system with integrated PV solar. Installations of the Tesla Solar Roof in California were supposed to start in the summer of 2017. In May I put a deposit on a Tesla's Solar Tile Roof to reserve a place on the waiting list.
Well, it turned out that the Tesla Solar Tile Roof was not going to happen in 2017. Telsa was trying to assimilate their recent acquisition of Solar City who would be managing the roofing projects. No one had actually seen a Tesla Solar Tile Roof. No one at Tesla or Solar City knew anything about when or if their Solar Tile Roof would be available. Also, the Tesla tiles would have produced only half as much power as traditional panels. The tiles look pretty, but it is commonplace to have solar panels here in the country. Eventually Tesla may get their act together with their solar tiles.
We probably dodged a bullet in canceling the Tesla Solar Tile Roof because our roof ended up being very complicated. One section is a 5 pointed star shape. I suspect trying to get a tile -- solar or not -- to work within those constraints would have been a nightmare.
Plan B: I started interviewing and pricing traditional solar systems.
The State of California provides an incredibly valuable public database which lists every grid-tied solar installation in the state by zip code, date, installer, cost per Watt and size. Using the database I was able to find what each local solar installer was charging and how much business they were doing. https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov/find_installer/
By August I found the wonderful Sebastopol-based solar company SolarWorks. I worked with SolarWorks to design a solar system to meet my needs, and SolarWorks was willing to wait and coordinate with my roofer. I canceled my Tesla Solar Roof order. But I still had to find a roofer.
Available roofers were hard to find that fall. Luckily, I found Doughty Enterprises, an excellent contractor who was up for the task of removing the old tar-and-gravel and creating a new composite roof over a new insulated deck.
That October Sonoma and Napa counties experienced devastating wildfires and thousands of structures burned. Fortunately, we were not directly impacted by the fires, and Doughty was able to slip my project in in November weather permitting. Sadly, rebuilding Sonoma County would take years. It continues today.
Doughty rebuilt the roof in late November, and SolarWorks dovetailed the solar installation onto the project between a couple small rainstorms in early December.
On December 28th 2017 PG&E signed off and granted permission to operate.
