Latest articles by The Solar Nerd

Solar panels don’t have any moving parts. They just quietly sit on your roof or in your backyard for a couple decades and generate electricity, day in and day out. How cool is that? A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows that new solar panels have a failure rate of only 5 in 10,000 per year. This means that every year, a solar panel has a 0.05% chance of failing, or a total 1.

At one point, Sungevity was the 5th largest residential solar installer in the United States. In 2017 it died (Chapter 11 bankruptcy), sold its assets, was reborn as a new company called Solar Spectrum, merged with another California installer called Horizon Solar Power, and then it brought back the Sungevity name. Along the way, it used debt and private equity to pursue a strategy of high growth - presumably to keep up with other high growth rivals like Sunrun and Vivint.

Homeowners who are interested in going solar often want to know how many solar panels it will take to power their house. The most accurate way to find that out is to get a professional solar installer to perform an analysis on your home. 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.

When you buy an 8 oz bag of potato chips, you generally expect the bag to actually contain 8 oz of chips. Following the same logic, if you have 6 kW of solar panels installed on your roof - about an average size system in the United States - it would seem reasonable to expect that system to actually generate 6 kW of electricity on a clear sunny day. But it works a little differently with solar panels.

Solar panels don’t have any moving parts and they rarely fail. But when they do, it can be a real pain. Relative to the total cost of your system, one solar panel isn’t that expensive. A budget panel might retail for $200, while a premium one might cost twice as much. But if you have a panel failure on your roof, not only do you have to worry about the cost of replacing the part, but the labor cost of having a technician come to your house, diagnose the problem, climb onto your roof, deinstall the bad panel and install a new one.

A couple decades ago, home solar panels were prohibitively expensive for the average homeowner and were limited to enthusiasts running low power, off-grid setups for small homes, such as a cabin in the woods. Today, prices have dropped to the point where an average homeowner can affordably install enough solar panels on their roof to provide 100% of their electricity needs. So what can you expect to actually pay for a system like this?

One of the great things about solar panels is that they just sit there, silently turning photons into electricity and making you money. They can essentially be maintenance-free for 25 years. But one question solar homeowners often have is: if my solar panels are dirty, what’s the best way to clean them? The best way to clean your solar panels is with tools you probably already have: a bucket of plain water, a soft brush or cloth, and the kind of extension pole you would use to squeegee your second floor windows.

Do you have a swimming pool? Nice! It’s not very pleasant to take a dip when your pool temperature is in the 70s, is it? The upfront cost of equipment to heat a swimming pool with traditional methods - natural gas, propane, or electricity - can be relatively low, but you will quickly learn that the monthly fuel cost for keeping 10,000 gallons of water at a nice temperature adds up quickly.

It’s pretty darn annoying when the electronics in your life start glitching. Are you having trouble with one of your devices? Have you tried turning the thing off and then on? That usually fixes it for me. But if that doesn’t work, it’s time to track down the source of the problem. If you’re talking about a device that relies on receiving a remote signal, whether that signal is wired or wireless, electromagnetic interference (EMI) is problem that can sometimes occur.

If you’re reading this during coronavirus times, you might be giving the idea of getting out of town and going off the grid more thought than usual. Whether that’s the case or you’re just normally into outdoor activities like camping, boating, or hunting, one thing that most people want is portable power. You might only need to keep some low-power devices charged like some phones or a tablet, or you might have more extensive electricity needs for things like a portable fridge to keep your drinks cold.