First Steps
Solaron offers prospective customers a free solar consultation. Eventually, this involves a visit to your home to examine the property in relation to its surroundings and to determine the exact space available for solar panels, either for pool heating or generating electricity. Before we take this step, however, there are two basic pieces of information that we need: your address and your electrical bills.
The Value of Your Address
To determine your home’s solar potential, we need to know how much sunlight you can expect to fall on your solar panels. Shade from trees has great value for cooling your house and your yard, but it negatively impacts the amount of solar heat or electricity that you can generate. Also, the typical location for solar panels is on the roof of your home. Therefore, we need to estimate how much roof space is actually usable for this purpose. All of this can be accomplished simply by looking at your home and yard via Google Earth. This way, we come to your house with some advance ideas, instead of needing to do a large number of measurements once we arrive.
The Value of Your Utility Bill
Twelve months of electrical bills give us three basic pieces of information that are critical to designing your solar array:
- What are your typical patterns of electrical usage throughout the day and the year?
- How much do you spend for electricity or pool heating?
- What is your actual consumption of electricity in kilowatt-hours?
With knowledge of these things, we determine the size of solar array that will meet your needs without saddling you with extra costs that are beyond what’s necessary. We can also tell you the amount of savings you can expect on your electrical bill, based on the size of your preferred installation.
Coming to your home prepared to discuss the potential savings you can realize from installing solar panels is critical to our ability to answer your questions. With an understanding of your location and the space available for solar panels, combined with a knowledge of your electricity needs, Solaron of Sacramento can get started designing the solar system that’s right for you and your family. In a future article, we will discuss what follows when conducting your free solar consultation.