Reviews by 1Glad1

Kenergy Solar

To summarize up front, we got quotes from six different installers, some to buy and some to lease. We plan to be in our house at least 12 to 20 years, and we crunched a bunch of numbers. We concluded in MD in late 2013 the economics definitely favor buying over leasing or PPA if you can get any kind of reasonably low rate financing (either on your own, or using the financing plan most installers offer). And buying from Kenergy was the best value we found out there.

We are extremely happy with the system Kenergy installed. We've had it in operation for about 4 months now. It works great, and produced about 15% more power than PVWatts's predictions in both June and July. Kenergy's price was the best when compared against several competitors. Their installers are very knowledgeable and skilled, their workmanship is great, and Kenergy was happy to come back after the install was complete and take care of a few minor cosmetic things I wanted done. The only thing that could have been better was how long it took from signing the contract until we started saving money on our power bills. But even with the delays, we would definitely choose Kenergy again.

Because schedule is the only less than perfect rating, here are the details. We thought the target was about 3 months from contract to Net Meter installed, but it ended up being about 5 months. To be fair, most of it wasn't Kenergy's fault. The majority of the delays were caused by nature (deep snows and/or bitter cold & windy days in Winter 2013-14), waiting on permits and inspections, and waiting on BGE to install the net meter. But I did think it took too long to get the right paperwork submitted to get the initial permit and start the job, and I felt like maybe they could have followed up with BGE a bit more to see if our paperwork was going through, so I gave them 4 stars instead of 5 for schedule.

But as I said up front, they did a great job and we are very satisfied. Our system generates enough power to more than cover our consumption in the sunny months. Since we got the net meter in early May our monthly BGE electric bill has only been an interconnect fee and taxes that come out to less than $8 month (we have gas for cooking and water heater, which is a separate bill). BGE is keeping track of the excess power we generate, and we should not get a bigger electric bill until sometime in winter when shorter days come and we use up our credits for the excess power.

We chose Kenergy over five other competitors because they were very knowledgeable, and flexible in what they could do. Some companies really just wanted to push leases or PPAs. Kenergy helped us evaluate several possible configurations. When we asked about different options and prices, they always stuck with high quality panels and inverters. Some competitors came back with lower prices, but went from quality panels with solid reviews to no-name panels. Kenergy with quality panels was still about the lowest price, even against no-name panel offers from competitors. The really big companies may have been able to push paperwork through faster, but that is not a given. Also, the bigger companies' prices were 8 to 15% higher. That added up to a few thousand dollars on our system, so even if they did the job 2 or 3 months faster getting savings on 3 months of electric bills wouldn't be worth the extra cost.

Overall we are very happy with our decision to go with Kenergy. So far everything is going great, and we highly recommend Kenergy.... read more

Type: Residential Electric

Reviewed: 08/26/2014