I talked to Kevin from SunGevity last night. I'd already submitted my info on their website, and responded to their email with a bit more information, so this was the actual "let's see if this will work for you" call. I have to say I'm impressed so far.
First let me tell you about the information they have from me and how I provided it.
I put in my information online, and it brought up an overhead satellite picture of my house which I verified was, indeed, my house. So now they know my roof and which directions it faces and such. They asked for the kW usage from my electric bills. I get eBills through my bank, so I had a year's worth available on my bank website - it took me about 5 minutes to go through a year's worth of bills and type in the number from each. They asked what kind of roof I have, and I happen to know that because it's on my refinance paperwork from last year and silly stuff like that sticks in my head. (Composite, if anyone cares.) I think there were a couple of other questions, but all things I knew off the top of my head.
So based on all of that, they determined that I would do best with a 416 kW/month system. This doesn't cover my electricity usage, but Kevin explained that the lowest tier of pricing from my electric company (SCE) were priced so low that it was actually more cost effective for me to use that rather than solar. But since I'm always at least in tier 3, and often all the way to tier 5, they sized a system that would keep me in the lowest of tier 3 most of the time, and all the way down into tier 2 on my slowest months. This, he explained, would be the best value for me. (I did work that out last night against my existing bills, and I'll explain later how that worked out.)
Their leased systems can be either fully prepaid upfront, partially paid upfront in any amount I want, or zero down. Obviously the more money I put down the lower the overall cost to me. But I don't have spare money right now. I'm funding a wedding and honeymoon. (Yay!) So I am most interested in the zero down option.
The way it works is that I pay my significantly lowered electric bill, and a flat monthly lease payment to SunGevity, and the total of the two payments is less than my current electric bill. SunGevity monitors my system to be sure it is producing correctly, and fixes any problems as soon as they see them. All repairs, maintenance, insurance, damage repairs (trees, neighbor's baseball, whatever), are covered by SunGevity. And if for any reason the system doesn't produce at least 95% of the estimated output in a month, they send me a check to reimburse me for the additional expense. Sounds safe to me.
He emailed me a link to my online quote, and I sat down with my year's worth of bills and actually worked out exactly what each bill would have been if I'd used 416 kW less each month, and added the lease payment back in.
My lowest usage month I still would have saved $10. My highest usage month (which is a lot more typical) I would have saved $45. Granted, I'm not going to retire on this amount of savings, but considering it won't cost me anything to do, it sounds pretty awesome to me.
I'm going to keep blogging about this process until I decide not to do it or until I've had the system long enough to have meaningful things to say about it. Hopefully others can learn from my experience.
Of course if anyone IS interested, there is a referral program. Please do comment here to request a referral!
