Sunrun

The guys that they sent out took three days to set up the panels. We had a backyard that we never used. We also have people that live behind us and there's always a privacy issue with us so we put the solar panels up in a south direction to get full sun from 8:00 in the morning until the sun goes down about 7:30 to 8:00 at night. We couldn't put that many on the roof because I have a new part of the house which would only take four panels and the in the old part of the house, the roof isn't solid enough to carry that weight so we did the solar panels in the back. They came in, they dug the holes, they poured the concrete. got the panels set up. They ran the electrical under the house right into the PG&E box and we were up and running and generating power. And they were all nice and knowledgeable. They showed my husband how to read the meter outside. Everything just worked perfectly.

The way this is set up is Sunrun owns the solar panels. They're responsible for the insurance. We do have to do the maintenance of keeping the panels clean and stuff, but if anything goes wrong with the solar panels, they will send somebody out to fix them. All we're paying is a monthly fee which is a hell of a lot less than we would have paid if we stayed with PG&E and it took all of that off our shoulders about having to get a loan and all of that stuff in order to be able to do it.

I'm very satisfied going solar. In the winter months, we were able to run our heaters more than we normally would have because PG&E is so expensive here, it's just outrageous. When March, April, and May came, it started getting nicer and we had everything off. My true-up went from $480 something down to 200. I figure, by the time we get to October for our true-up, we're gonna be even so I'm getting enough solar to offset at a cheaper kilowatt rate that even on the flat fee, we're gonna save probably about $6,000 over the year. It's awesome.

The rep got our last two or three years of kilowatt consumption and billing costs from PG&E downloaded into a spreadsheet and then they base their monthly rate on an average for us, but it was an average that was cheaper than what PG&E would have cost us. We went through all the figures and the kilowatt usage, 'cause I'm always trying to be careful with PG&E anyway. We stuffed as much insulation in the walls as we could. We had already replaced with thermo-insulated windows all through the house and we redid all the sheetrock on the inside of the house and insulated the attic, the walls, and the flooring, installed an attic fan and were trying to make the best ‘cause there's one room that gets really hot and that happens to be the living 'cause it gets full sun all day.

So, our PG&E bills were running $200, $300, and $400 a month in the winter, depending on how cold it got. In the summer, because the walls are so thin, this one room gets really hot, so we were running an air conditioning unit a lot. I never had a bill lower than $170 to $200 a month even in the summer. But now, I'm getting zero from PG&E and my true-up has gone down to $200 and something. By the end of the summer, we're gonna be even and it's already saved me a bunch of money. Sunrun was really great. I've already recommended them to my neighbor. I gave him a copy of this business card for the contract rep because he was interested in solar too. And if anybody asks me, these are the people I'll recommend.

I got a friend in Denver, Colorado and when I went there, it was all solar panels and that sparked my interest. Tony was the one who reached out to me. I made him talk and he gave me the whole Sunrun deal but all I needed to know were how many panels, where they were gonna put them and when I was going to get a battery pack. We have our storms and that was my main concern because my house is all electric. So, with all of the home improvements, AC, insulation, windows and all of that, solar was my only option because nobody's doing wind yet. If I can have a wind turbine, I'd put that on here too but I can't do a generator because we don't have gas in the neighborhood. So, I would have to store gasoline in my garage and hope it doesn't blow up.

I’m trying to save energy and for my peace of mind, I’m trying to make my house as environmental-friendly as I can. I even have a water filtering system. So, with the hurricanes and storms we get in Texas, I never know when we're gonna have to boil water. I'm good with water but I'm trying to get electricity. I'm trying to get off the grid in the city. I asked Tony to get me a great package deal on some battery packs. When we have hurricanes here in Houston, I wanna have electricity. Here, we would be without lights for almost a week. It depends on where you at and how bad it is, so I need some off the grid power. I’m waiting right now on Brightbox because I’ve got the solar. I need the battery packs or a good cost on the them. When our lights go out, I need energy because of my wife's health. Generators would have been good but no gas. So, solar is my next option.

Enrolling with Sunrun was very easy and I understood some of it as far as the billing but I was trying to understand again as far as me having a bill from Sunrun and then me having a bill from Think Energy. It depends on how much energy I produce to save and at the time when it was installed, it was more during the winter months where days are shorter and more clouds. So, I'm looking forward now being the summertime to where it's hotter. I know the solar panels absorb heat in the sun, so I should be producing good for the next winter.

I was using Stream Energy which was one of the cheaper ones on the market and on the average, in the summertime, my bill would be somewhere in the ballpark of $190. In the wintertime, it would be somewhere in the ballpark of 160. With Sunrun, it would be 132. The first few months I had with Think Energy, the highest I paid was $76 so, I was still kinda within that range. However, just last month, I got my bill from Think Energy and it was $7. So, I'm on my way.

On the day that I was supposed to turn the electricity on, Sunrun told me that I was supposed to go in the garage and turn the levers on. I did that and it worked, but it scared the hell out of me. I wanted them to do that and I couldn't believe that with a $20,000 system, they couldn't send somebody to my house to turn it on for me. Then, after everything was done, I called up and told Sunrun that I saw two doves die from electrical shock. I asked them how do we address that and in the end, I had to go find another firm to do the critter guards. I wish Sunrun talked to me about that and had that as part of their system. Also, there's no way to clean the panels and I have to go find myself a way to clean them if they get dirty. So there is no follow up service plan with Sunrun.

Sunrun's reps were very good though when I called them up in a panic because initially, I didn't understand very well why on a cloudy day, my production went all over the place. So, I complained to some of their people. But one of them told me that since I bought my system, I was no longer their concern. I found out who’s the head of that company then I called right away and told them what I was being told. I made this big investment and it's not like I could call my local electrician or plumber about it. And out here in California, PG&E has been trying to help solar people but they’re such a mess of themselves right now that we don't have them behind us to help us.

Another thing that's still very unclear to me is how to get a new panel if one of my panels breaks. Aside from that, I got my system done in June and when Sunrun came out with this battery, I wanted it but they're telling me that I can't have it because I'm an old Sunrun customer. So I'm not able to have a battery where my extra electricity would go into and if the power goes out, I don't have my own battery there to back me up. I also heard that people are having struggles with the one bill that they get at the end of the year. Depending on how many panels you have, your bill could be 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000, and it would be hard to challenge your end bill. Plus, the electric company is supposed to be buying back my electricity but that's very foggy, too. I've heard that they'd pay us 5 cents a kilowatt and they charge 45 cents a kilowatt for people to use our electricity. That's why I'm really big on wanting my own battery.

And because PG&E is having such a grid problem when they wanna do their growing turn-offs during the terrible summertime, I would like to have my own electricity from my battery to back me up when the lights go off. But Sunrun told me that the box wasn't compatible with the solar panels and it made me feel like they dumped their old inventory on me without telling me that those people that got installed in July were gonna be the only ones to have the battery.

Apparently, all of Sunrun's money and resources are going into getting people up and running and they do that very well. But when it comes to aftercare or even explaining it, they need to put some smart people there who'll be able to talk to customers because people get scared. Other than that, Sunrun's product is amazing and their service all the way up to the installation of the panels was fabulous. In fact, the people I had on the roof who put the critter guards on said that the panels look very good. I've also had electricians work on other things and they said the panels look amazing.

When the Sunrun sales rep came to our house, he had already done a Google maps search and found our house. He already knew the square footage of the home and the orientation, and he had a rough design of the system. So it was a no-brainier. And when we started talking about his company, he was very willing to give us contact, names of people whom we could call who had Sunrun experiences. He was great. He came back to us with a proposal and I had some questions so he came back to the house again. I had more questions and he came back to the house again. Fortunately, he lives a couple of towns away from where we live, so that worked out really well. He used to stop at the house either on his way to work or on his way home from work. So it was really great. It felt like we were getting hand-holding which is always nice. The questions were answered to our satisfaction.

After that, we had to decide whether to lease the panels through Sunrun or purchase it. We decided to purchase it given a shorter payback period. Fortunately, we had the money to do that. The sales rep explained the federal tax credit so I understood how that worked. Unfortunately, we're in New Hampshire where there's no personal income tax and no sales tax so New Hampshire is always broke. There was a state tax credit but they ran out of money so we lost out on that. That would have been a couple thousand dollars which would have been nice. But that wasn't a deal breaker. We called in through Comcast. Comcast had a deal where they provided us with a $600 prepaid debit card which was nice. So, we took advantage of everything and my wife and I both understood exactly what we were getting into.

After that, the sales rep quickly handed our account off to a project manager and they were handling all the paperwork such as the permits for the town that we live in, the contact with our utility to get the utility to do the hook up then the conversion of the net-zero meter, and the scheduling of the installation of the system. Everybody at Sunrun was really very communicative about what was happening and where things stood. I was always up-to-date. Everything that was happening was exactly what the sales rep told us was going to happen. The process affirmed what we anticipated and we came to expect that things were just going to continue running smoothly, which they did. Sunrun had also warned us that getting the utility to switch over the meter could sometimes take weeks, if not, a month or more. But in the end, it was just a couple of weeks so we were up and running two or three weeks sooner than I anticipated.

When we got our first month electric bill for my utility, just based on the dates and the way the system was tied up and connected to the utility grid, it wasn't a full month, but our electricity bill dropped from roughly $150 a month during the summer time to 35 bucks. That was the partial month. When we got our first full month of generating electricity bill from the utility, it was $13. And when we got our second bill a week and a half ago, it was $12.98 and that amount is the utility charge to be connected to the grid. So we're not paying anything for electricity.

All of our electricity is being generated plus we're now banking credits. In New Hampshire, whatever excess we generate goes back out to the street. And as the meter turns backwards, we're actually generating credits with the utility. Right now, we have about a month and a half worth of credits stored up right and those credits will be used when we get into December, January, February, March because we have long winters in New Hampshire. We know that the system won't generate as much then as it does in these summer months but those credits that we're banking will help defray the larger utility bills during the winter months. Overall, we're very pleased with our decision to go solar. My family is blessed that we can afford to do this.

The Sunrun rep was so patient and very informative. He did a much better job of educating me about the whole solar process and ended up giving me a quote for the minimum size that they could quote, which is 10 panels. It was only $700 more than SolarCity's but it was larger because SolarCity did a smaller system. So I told him that I would go with Sunrun because I trust Costco over Tesla. Also, I didn’t mind buying more than I needed because I’m hoping my next car would be electric, so I’ll probably need more panels.

I've been going solar since mid-June when it went live. The Sunrun team is very professional and they keep you informed. They’ll keep in touch with you every step of the way, letting you know what’s going on. They were good at predicting how long the process would take because it does take a lot longer. Most people don’t realize that solar is not something you just buy and it happens overnight. They have to get permits and then the city’s PG&E has to come out and inspect it. Also, the city has to inspect it as well before you go live.

There was one guy that irritated me though. He was the one who came out and inspected my house to measure, to make sure the roof was okay for solar. I hope I don't sound prejudicial, but he was Filipino. I asked him to go up by a ladder through the hole in the garage to get to the roof but he insisted that he would go through this crawlspace in my hallway that had never been opened. Also, I didn’t want him to go there because there was another access point. Still, he acted like he knew better than me and he was not gonna take directions from some ** female. There was insulation above that thing so I asked him when he came down if he put it back the way it was, which he couldn’t possibly do because once he put the wood down, he couldn’t lay that to make sure that it was flat and covering everything properly. He said yes but after he left, I noticed that the wood wasn’t even flat. It wasn’t correct.

I talked to the next two people who came and to everybody. I expected them to deal with this man and tell him, “I’m the customer. You listen to the customer. Also, give your guy some training.” The reps both promised they would. I could tell they followed up because they had it in their notes. The next person that came, someone I've never met before, asked to look at the site. So I knew that the word was passed along and that they were going to make right for what this guy did. That was good.

I went to the climate change rally in San Francisco on Saturday and I felt good that if anybody would ask, I could say I went solar because it’s the right thing to do. It wasn't about the need to save money because my electric bill was $38. I looked at the history in the app to see how much I’m spending or saving, and it has only been four days since it went live but I’ve used more than I sent to the grid. I pretty much send electricity to the grid every day, although it could change in the winter. I bank my extra energy for a time when I might need some. Overall, going solar has been great.

I would appreciate if Sunrun can manage to get it done because here in Jersey, sometimes it snows a lot and if a lot of snow falls on the top of this sunroom roof which is a glass roof, it can break. That something is still my concern and that needs to be fixed by Sunrun. That was my initial condition. I even had an email conversation that they have to put something for snow before they run the panels, before Sunrun and I signed the contract. They gave me the email and said that yes, that will be done. They did it, but they didn't finish the whole thing. After I complained, Sunrun said they will inform the person who installed and they will arrange when the weather improved. That time was wintertime. The weather has improved and summer is almost gonna be over now, and still nothing is done. Nobody even called me.

The other concern is they could have put some more panels and created some more coverage. If they had put some more panels and covered a little bit more energy, then it could have been better. The third one is was told that Sunrun was gonna come up with a battery where I can store the energy for a week or two and I believed in that. They also told me that they would use my house as a test so the cost for me would be very, very minimal. But now, nothing happened. They don't call me to put the battery. It's like it was just talk.

I asked many times to have a proper usage adjustment made and has never been done. 2nd, the Company Sunrun had to install the solar system Horizon, did faulty wiring and not to color code as to be and was in fact verified by one of Sunrun's techs that have come one time also to notice and which I have pictures of burnt the wires in a Control Box and could have burnt our home very easy. 3rd, just to get by a county inspection the Installers placed 2ea Ground rods in the ground, but having trouble doing so, cut both rods less than 2 foot long to stick in ground taking pictures to send County Inspector to get the Permits they needed.

4th, have made multi complaints on record to the fact That everyday between 2:30 and 3PM in full sunlight over our Home and Solar producing OVER 6000 + Kwh and yet not using any additional items than have been using all day the Solar goes off grid, back to paying EDISON and this has been a daily happening from day one and have complained many many times. Always getting a runaround from people at Sunrun talked to and said is an Edison thing... BS, I have a Edison manager, lives 4 houses from me, installed his own Solar system and he has told me He Produces Solar from Daylight to dark and only, uses a little of Edison power during the night hours which is very minimal.

Last year and end of year having a year's solar power which to say had a 100% Solar System installed 28 panels I had to pay Edison just under $1000.00 year end over and above the high monthly payments to Sunrun for a 100% System.... This year a few months ago the year end to Edison was just over $200 so was not complaining but if the light of full all day sun now past few months the Edison year end keeps going up and up. Just under $500 now aside from a small monthly bill on top and we do not, use anything other than what we have always used period.

Enrolling with Sunrun was good. However, when they installed some online connection so I don’t have to take a reading and I can see on my computer, that didn’t work well. It was giving wrong information so now, I take manual reading and report. Once I reported it to the 2 companies that were involved, the company who own those panels and the company who runs it, they never responded. Other than that, I'm happy with Sunrun. My electric bill is only usually at $12.50. Aside from the financial benefit, I contribute to fewer carbon print. That’s what I feel like also. There are three persons interested and I contacted Sunrun but nobody responded.

I also get a bill every now and then, 7 bucks. But before, it was steadily climbing. I also knew that SDG&E was gonna be raising their rates and the tax consequences were very appealing. So that's what kept the least amount there. But as far as installing it on another property, I would hesitate because the lease payment might be a detraction if you were selling a property.