12/8/16 Living In The Future, How About You?

    It took a good four months from the first time I let Solar Girl in the house, until we got our solar panels installed, but I am now part of the solution, whereas most of you poo flinging monkeys are still part of the problem.  Yes, our house is now powered by the sun, provided the sun decides to shine.  Fifty percent of our roof was outfitted with enough solar panels to give us an 85% theoretical power supply when averaged out year round.
    I honestly did not do this because I am a steward of the environment, although if you want to applaud me for my actions feel free, I am still currently waving left and right like I am on a float in a parade.  The reason I chose to do this is that theoretically we are going to be getting free energy for half the life of the panels.  They are warranted to still be producing at 85% after 25 years.  We are going to be paying them off in twelve years at a cost of $311 a month.  This might sound high, but every summer we battle our utility bill which goes into the $700 range.  The light portion can be close to $500, and as they showed us on a fancy graph, has energy ever been offered to us cheaper than it was or do we gradually pay more every year?  With our own production of power, we can tell the light company to suck it, although I won't, because our system still works in unison with the light company.
    During the day the system produces a surplus of power, hopefully, if we don't use it all up, it feeds it into the city line and makes our meter run in reverse.  If it runs far enough back in reverse, we will then have a surplus of power that the light company holds for us, when we do use city power, like at night, we can count on the meter being reversed enough that it does not have a net positive movement.
    The system also has some cool features, such as monitoring of each panel separately, so if a panel stops working, we can tell right away.  Plus, our house looks cool, admit it, those panels look fancy, think of it in twenty years everyone will have them, why not?  People like to cry about us not doing anything for the planet, well, this does something, it is that much less fossil fuel or coal being burnt to run our house.  I truly believe the rest of our roof will one day be covered in solar cells and either one or both our cars will be charged off these systems to give us free mobile power.