Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

Petersen-Dean, a roofing and solar company founded in 1984 that operated in nine states, went bankrupt in 2020, leaving many of its customers in limbo. The company operated in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas. They started as a roofing company, then began offering solar installations, especially in California where solar installations are required on some new homes. While the COVID pandemic was perhaps the straw to break its back, the company was apparently in poor financial health for some time.

If you’ve ever seen a solar panel up close, you might have noticed thin little wires running across each cell. Those little wires do the important job of carrying electrons (electricity) generated by the solar cells into thicker main wires of the panel. You might know from high school science that thin wires have higher resistance, which means they lose more electricity as heat. In a solar panel, that means lower efficiency.

For most people, their home is their biggest financial asset. Drilling holes into it might seem like a bad idea, but that’s usually what’s needed to install solar panels on a roof. And yet, this does not need to be cause for concern: there are millions of homes with solar panels around the United States, and the majority of them are problem-free. Solar panels do not need to cause roof leaks: they can last problem-free for 25 years or more.

My solar-powered house is located in Buffalo, which is pretty famous for snow. The biggest one-day record for snow in Buffalo? 34 inches. Despite that reputation for the white fluffy stuff, we also get plenty of sunshine - even in the winter. In fact, clear and cold days in the winter can be great for solar production. Still, there are multiple weeks a year when my solar panels are underneath a blanket of snow.

The average size of a home solar installation in the United States is around 6 kilowatts, which is about 17 high efficiency premium solar panels, or more if you go with a cheaper panel. That many solar panels takes up a lot of space, and you would need a large available roof area to accommodate them. But sometimes, your roof might not be ideal for solar. It might be oriented east-west (which generates less power than a north-south orientation) or, more commonly, you might have shading from nearby trees or buildings.

Does your life involve taking lots of little electronic devices with you? Do you constantly worry about how much battery charge you have? Is the nearest outlet sometimes too far away? The solution that people typically reach for is an external battery. These are great and cheap, but suffer from a couple major flaws. First of all: you need to remember to keep them charged. If you have difficulty remembering to charge your phone, with an external battery now you have two things to keep track of.

For many homeowners, their house is their biggest investment, so anything that improves its value is a big win. Do you ever watch those home renovation shows on TV? If so, you know that the visual appeal of a house can have a big impact on its selling price. According a study by the universities of Alabama and Texas, homes with a high curb appeal sell for an average of 7% more than less attractive homes.

I personally like the look of solar panels on my house. I think they’re interesting to look at, and they’re often a conversation starter. But my solar panels face the backyard away from the street, so even if I didn’t like how they look, people casually passing by don’t see them. Not everyone has that choice: typically, you want your solar panels pointed south to capture as much sunlight as possible, but doing that might mean facing the panels toward the curb.

With the exploding popularity of rooftop solar, competition among solar installers to capture as much of that market is intense. If you live in one of the hot markets for rooftop solar such as California, Hawaii, the southwest, and some northeast states, there’s a good chance you’ve heard your doorbell ring and found a solar salesperson at your door, ready to pitch you on the benefits of rooftop solar. It’s one thing to buy Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints!

If you have a very large house, you probably have high electricity usage too, possibly making your home a good candidate for solar. If you’re curious about solar and want to find out how many solar panels you’d need for your home that is 4,000 square feet or larger, the most accurate way to find that out is to get a professional solar installer to perform an analysis. A quick but somewhat less accurate way is to read your monthly electric bill and use our solar calculator to determine what your power generation and estimated system price would be.