CLAYPOOL - Kurt Carlson was so impressed with how much money he is saving with solar panels for his residential property, he wanted to tell his community about it.
“I got my fifth bill since it went in. I thought, ‘You know, this is pretty remarkable,” he said in an interview Monday. His solar panels went live in early February.
Comparing the same five months in 2024 to 2023, Carlson said, “This time last year I paid $954 in electricity. Then that’s just for the one property. And now it’s a credit of $239, so that’s a swing of $1,193. I’ve got two properties - one system for one and one system for the other. And then the other one, this time last year, I paid $1,739 and so far I’ve gotten a credit on these same five months of $91, so that’s a swing of $1,830. So a total for the five months of $3,023 in savings.”
Carlson said the savings has been better than what he thought they would be. “So I’m a pleased customer,” he said.
John Moorman, general manager with Advanced Solar, Warsaw, said they installed the solar panels on Carlson’s property this past spring.
The size of the system they installed is 29.92 kW on the house and then 14.96 kW on the guest house.
“This is probably a little bigger than the average. On the average a residential is going to probably be more so the smaller system, which is for the guest house,” said Glen Miller, Advanced Solar owner and president. “We size every project according to your needs, so according to Kurt’s needs is how we designed this off of so that we can offset his electric usage. That’s the basic starting point for all designs.”
Moorman said everyone’s is custom designed.
“The nice thing is, like REMC or any of your utility companies, on your bill they’ll give you the last 12 or 13 months of your usage. If you’ve lived in your house for than a year, you’ll have what your history is for the last 12-13 months on your electric bill. That’s the answer to how we size the system,” he said.
Carlson said his system was meant to offset his electric bill 100%, though not everyone goes for that high of an offset.
“We try to get to 100% offset the best we can,” Moorman said. “But just like when we first started out talking to Kurt, we were first looking at trying to put it on the roof of the house because it would be closer to the house, but there just wasn’t enough roof space, things weren’t going to work out. So we then ended up back here, he has this nice property, and we were able to put enough panels up to get him 100% offset.”
In the months of May through September, Moorman said you’re wanting to build up enough credits as you possibly can so that when the dreary, cloudy months of winter arrive, you start using those electric credits up. By the time March/April rolls around, you’ve used up about all your credits but you start building the credits back up as the days get sunnier.
“So it’s a roller coaster ride. We installed the first of February for him. His first electric bill, it wasn’t a big savings,” Moorman said.
Carlson said when he looked at his next bill, he saw his savings were starting.
“So we install in the month of June or July and everybody gets their next electric bill and it’s really huge. I install in January where there’s less sunlight, they get their first bill, they’re like, ‘This isn’t so great.’ So, it’s meant to be a 12-month offset,” Moorman explained.
Carlson said he’s not off the electric grid, he’s still connected. When the sun goes down, his residences go on the grid. When the sun rises again, they go back off the grid.
“So this is pretty much during daylight hours and I still have that much savings. So if I had batteries, that savings would be even better. Batteries are pretty expensive, but so far I haven’t needed them,” Carlson said.
Miller said what Carlson has is the standard grid-tie system.
“There’s three levels of systems. There’s a standard grid-tie system, which is exactly what Kurt said, what he has here. Solar offsets your electric usage, you’re connected to the grid, so any time you don’t have solar power, you’re relying on the grid,” he said.
The next level would be with batteries. If you did grid-tie with battery backup, your batteries come into play if there’s a power outage or if you want to use them at night time to slow down your electric buying time.
The third option doesn’t really apply to what Carlson has, Miller said. “That’s an off-grid, what the Amish people do. It’s completely off-grid, completely isolated from the grid.”
Moorman said the grid-tie is the most economical cost-effective system.
“It’s a give-and-take. Any time your solar produces, it’s going to go to the house first. Any excess gets pushed back to the grid, and REMC gives Kurt credit for all that excess that gets pushed back, and then at night when the sun goes down, then he pulls back from those credits that he got during the day. We build up enough credits during the summertime so that when we run into the winter, we use those credits up,” he said.
Not everyone’s system may offset 100% of their electric bill, as it could be 50 to 75% depending on how much room there is for solar panels, but it’s still going to save you money, Moorman said.
“We have a lot of customers that put in a system that only offsets 40-50%, 70 or 80 or 90%; just sometimes we get lucky we have enough room that we can do 100% offset,” he stated.
Miller said sometimes a customer will do it in stages. It could be 50% now, and then down the road they might come back and do the other 50%. It depends on how the customer’s budget works out.
“We’ve seen that a lot more in the commercial field, but the commercial field is the same concept, same theory, it works the same way,” he said. “There’s a few more benefits on the commercial standpoint than on the residential.”
Everybody gets a 30% federal tax credit, commercial or residential, Miller said. The businesses, as long as it’s a small business or considered a small business in a rural area, they also will be able to apply for a grant. “So there’s grants available for commercial and agricultural - what they call small, rural businesses. That small is actually pretty large in the scale of things, but that’s an additional. Currently, they have 50% grants available for businesses. Then, you get your 30% tax credit yet,” he said.
Advanced Solar has been doing a lot of commercial projects for businesses lately, he said, and they’ve been getting 65-75% of their projects paid for by the time they get the grant and tax credit. “Then you get depreciation yet. So you get those three things, their return on investment oftentimes falls into the three-year range,” he said.
“You only get the tax advantage the year that they turn it on, so it’s this year I get the tax advantage,” Carlson said.
There’s a 25-year warranty on the solar panels.
They do live monitoring on all of their sites so if anything goes wrong, it alerts Advanced Solar.
For more information about Advanced Solar, visit the website at https://advancedsolarllc.com/.