05/01/2013
Anonymous
At my home we bought a lease through a California based company called Sungevity. We found them as members of Sierra Club, and they were partnered with Sierra Club themselves and had a really nice incentive program for SC members. We did the standard 20yr solar lease and put $2500 down on the system, we could have done zero down if we had wanted, but we chose to put some skin in the game and get our lease payments set where we wanted them too. Also, the incentives through the lease / SC partnership were that we received $1250 (Visa gift card) back after the system was commissioned, an iPad 4, and a $750 donation in our names to Sierra Club, so we looked at it as getting the majority of our $2500 down payment back at the end of the day. <br /><br />We are now NET monthly energy producers and have been for all but the first month of installation, as the install occurred on the 10th of the month. I have made a few other efficiency upgrades to our home as well, to make the most out of going solar, like replacing our old pool pump with a really efficient one (we used our $1250 gift card on that), replaced the lighting throughout the house with LED's and CFL's, and got rid of our garage refrigerator that we weren't really using anyway (but was a pig in the summer months). To put it into perspective financially, our lease payments and the $18 in fees we pay to the power company every month are almost exactly half of what we paid for power over these same months before solar. We think it was an awesome investment (for a lot of reasons) and definitely recommend Sungevity as a solar company as well.