10/31/2018
Anonymous
Tampa, FL
Read the full post, because this is information that will guide you into a $20,000+ decision. If you decide not to, then you've probably already made up your mind :)<br /><br />I found out about Momentum Solar through a Facebook advertisement. Just to learn more, I clicked the ad and provided my information. I was contacted by a representative who asked me if I could spare one hour of our time to speak with someone. I told them I would be able to talk with them in a few days. The online rep asked if my wife would be around, and I said they would not. They insisted my wife be part of the discussion -- at this point I knew I'd need to be careful and fully expected everything that followed.<br /><br />My wife and I met with the representative. They took the time to ask us what we knew about solar, and gave us some background on the company. The sales rep sent some information on our house to their analysis and technical team which resides in another state. While they were busy doing the analysis and cranking on the numbers, we continued to receive more and more information. At one point, we were giving the following fact: "The national average increase in electric costs per year is 4%". So let's remember this number. <br /><br />The team sent back a sales proposal based on analysis of our property. It was explained to me that they have spent millions of dollars to subscribe to regularly scheduled satellite photos of potential installation sites, as well as the software which looks at the imagery and calculates how much power can be produced based on the latitude, longitude, average weather, elevation, tree and brush coverage, height of the building, pitch of the roof, and other complicated factors. Very impressive and all quite true. The proposal listed the total system cost, expected power generation per year, cost for payments on a 20 year loan, date of return on investment (ROI), and showed how with the average increase of 4% per year, it would be a no-brainer to get solar. I was excited.<br /><br />By this point, he was talking to us a bit longer than the one hour promised. We had a commitment, and I explained we'd need to wrap things up. At that point, he thought the appropriate response would be to belittle us — he said, "if whatever you have to do is more important than saving money and being your own power producer then we can wrap things up." So yeah that was pretty aggravating. I explained I would perform my own analysis, learn a bit more about solar, and give him a call back. He insisted that anything I needed to know about solar, he could tell me, and it wouldn't be worth it to spend the time doing the research on my own.<br /><br />The financial feasibility depends on three important factors: (1) The cost of electricity and a year-over-year increase of 4% (2) Panels that aren't too expensive. For example, you might get a panel that's “very good†and costs a normal amount, then there's another panel that's marginally better than “very good†but costs much more. So I did my research and asked for different panels. (3) The loan is packaged in a way that doesn't cause you to pay a lot in interest on top of the panels.<br /><br />The proposal was inaccurate. As a resident of Tampa, our power is supplied by TECO. Over the last decade, they have not had a significant rise in electric costs. As a matter of fact, power costs often go down, despite claims by the sales rep that “Duke Energy†is raising all of their costs. Here's the thing — if they use multi-million dollar software to model costs, why can't they model the rising costs of electricity for the area of their potential customers? Then it would be an apples to apples comparison. They questioned my numbers until I told them they were from the Department of Energy and TECOs own historical day. Asked why they don't provide an apples-to-apples analysis, the sales rep stated they don't have the time, manpower, or relationships with power companies to accomplish that. Seems like the likely answer is if they told customers what it really costs to have solar, they wouldn't have so many customers.<br /><br />Long story short on how we made the numbers work — we got panels that were priced appropriately and did a 10-year lower interest loan instead of a 20-year high interest loan. Even with relatively stable electric costs, it works out to our benefit.<br /><br />The installation took six hours and happened within three weeks. The installers were unprofessional. One of the installers urinated in my backyard. The other promised to send pictures of the installation so I could submit it to my insurance company. Never happened. Another got dirt all over my ceiling access to the attic — we had to repaint it. As you can imagine, once the sales rep secures the sale, they basically become unreachable. What used to be a 30 minute response time to emails becomes three days.<br /><br />The panels do a great job of supplementing our power and I'm glad we have them. They cover about 90-95% of our annual power consumption and there's a great website that provides lots of information. My recommendation would be to get solar, price it out, run the numbers, and stay away from Momentum.