Review for Southern Exposure Solar

Office location: 11030 Richardson Road Suite B21, Ashland VA, 23005

12/18/2023
Wagging Tails Kennel Moseley, VA

Wagging Tails Kennel

Wagging Tails Kennel is a family owned business located in Chesterfield,Va. We provide pet boarding and grooming services. We have 111 indoor/outdoor kennels with heating and AC. Our electric bills in the summer 2022 were over $1000 per month! We have wanted to add solar power to the business for years. Now, with the tax rebates from the Federal government and the Virginia Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SREC), it’s actually a very good investment. I was contacted by a solar panel installation company out of Phoenix, AZ 16 months ago about putting solar panels on my house. I did some checking on that company’s reputation and decided I needed someone else. I looked online for who was local and had a good track record and found Southern Exposure Solar. I sent them a message over the weekend and was pleased to get a reply first thing on Monday morning. Grayson impressed me immediately with his knowledge and honesty. Southern Exposure Solar evaluated my home and both of my business buildings and recommended against installing panels on my home and one of the business buildings, but the other building was an excellent candidate. Unfortunately, that is the building that uses the least amount of electricity. Grayson explained that the meters for both business buildings could be combined so that the solar panels on the west building could offset the usage of the east building also. If we could get enough panels on the roof of the east building, Wagging Tails Kennel would have low or no electricity bills for the life of the system (25 - 40 years). It turns out this is a lot more complicated than I had expected. Chesterfield County’s permit process is difficult for any contractor, but the county put extra hurdles in place for commercial installations. We are a facility that cares for over 150 pets during our busiest weeks. We needed the installation done when the west building was empty. Oddly, the fire department requirements for businesses is higher than for homes! Fire access cut into the available square footage on the roof. Maximizing the number of panels on one building so that it could produce electricity for both required careful design - Southern Exposure Solar managed to get over 60 panels on a single story building. The attic space in the building was already crammed with heat/AC ducts so there wasn't much space to work or add equipment. Dominion Power was in the middle of a major grid upgrade - solar panel installations were not a priority for them. We were especially difficult because of the aggregated meters (Both meters are summed into a single account so it acts like it is a single building. This requires a special meter, but the excess produced by the west building is credited to the east building at RETAIL rates which is a really big deal!). Southern Exposure Solar worked with Chesterfield County and Dominion to meet all my requirements. Grayson kept me updated on problems and installation options. They beat the schedule that we had agreed to. They stayed on budget - there were no last minute unexpected costs. When the system was online, they showed me how to use an app on my phone to see the daily production - how much electricity is being imported and exported. The crew was great and made sure that there was no negative impact to business activities. We have been producing solar power electricity for 8 months now. I looked at the year to date stats and the new system has generated 24 Megawatt hours of energy. (SES predicted 30 Megawatts per year and we are slightly ahead of schedule.). In mid-December it is still generating about 80 Kilowatt hours on a sunny day (about ⅔ of the amount it generated in the summer which surprised me because the days are so much shorter).