8/24/16 I Shall Make The Sun My Bitch?

    It is time to put that fat yellow a-hole to work for us.  Every summer it beats the crap out of us, makes us stay indoors, spend tons of money on electricity, causes skin cancer, and even makes getting in your car a pain in the ass.  I am preparing to flip the script and put the sun to work for me.  I shall call you my Bitch, and you will call me Daddi.
    Last week we had a vendor from a solar power company come by.  Honestly, I gave her the time of day because she was cute and looked half dead in the heat.  I invited her in and gave her a tea from the fridge to cool off.  It seems Austin is in the midst of offering new incentives for residential households to install solar power to their houses.  She needed to see our kilowatt hour usage and more or less the size of the house.  She then took the data to her engineers and came back a few days later with an analysis and plans to best serve our house.
    The first plan covers 61% of our power needs and comes out costing us $204 for twelve years or $171 for twenty years.  This number was chosen because that is equivalent to 10Kw of power and that is as much incentive as City of Austin is giving per household.  There are then federal grants that add another +$10,000 in cost savings.  The unit costs a total of $24,000.
    We could also opt for 100% coverage of our light bill, but that would not all be covered by the City of Austin grant, thus we would pay more upfront and as a total.  This would cost us $354 for twelve years or $299 for twenty years.  Yes, as Wife says, this seems pricey, but you have to remember to remove the light part of the City of Austin bill.  That is easily $220 in the no AC time of the year or as much as $424 in the middle of summer.  This would not include any of the other parts of the city bill, such as water, wastewater, trash, and such, so we could still expect a $170-$200 bill from the city.
    The idea that the meter could run in reverse excites me.  I want to produce power that the city will then take and use and thus, the city will owe me.  This is all dependent on Wife agreeing to sign up for the service.  There is no down payment, we do not get charged for the system until it is installed and proved that it is working.  It adds value if we decided to sell the house, and it has a 25 year warranty.  I cannot think of any real negatives, unless the whole thing is a scam, but we had a different group of guys today and they started by saying Austin has new energy incentives to get more people on solar power which was how the chick started and they were an entirely different company, but guys get no love, I sent them walking, pronto.