Homeowners
We are not going to knock on your door, call you at dinner, or put a salesperson in your living room. Everything we know is on this page. When you have a question, we will answer it — and if the answer is that solar does not make sense at your house, we will tell you that too.
Solar costs money up front. That investment is viable and it pays back — but it is capital you are moving from the utility to your own roof, and it should be treated like any other improvement to your home. We price it that way and we show our work.
Your energy costs are driven by your envelope, your HVAC, your water heater, and your habits as much as by your rate. Our sister company SENERCON has rated new homes for energy performance since 2004, so we know where the waste hides. Sometimes the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you stop using.
Storage is worth buying because you want the lights, the fridge, and the AC to stay on when the grid goes down. Judge it the way you judge a generator or an insurance policy. Any bill savings it produces on top of that is a bonus.
Utilities across the country are redesigning residential rates — time-of-use pricing, lower credit for exported power, and new fixed or demand-based charges. Under those structures, sending your midday surplus to the grid is often worth far less than it used to be. A battery lets you keep that energy and use it in the evening when power costs the most, which is exactly when solar has stopped producing. The combination protects you from the rate change; solar by itself may not.
Every rate increase makes an owned system worth more, because the price you avoid goes up while the cost of the panels on your roof stays fixed. The reverse is also true of leases and long-term payment products with escalators built in. That difference is the single most important thing to understand before you sign anything, and it is why we will always show you the purchase option first.
It depends on your usage, your roof, your shading, and your rate — not on your square footage. Send us twelve months of bills and we will model it. Bigger is not automatically better, especially where export credit is low; the right size is often the one that covers what you actually consume on site.
We commission the system, walk you through the monitoring, and hand you the documentation. If something stops producing, you call us. We have been installing in this region since 2008 and we service systems other companies installed, including ones whose installers are no longer in business.
Possibly, and we will say so plainly. EPE's pilot with Base Power puts a whole-home backup system in qualifying Texas homes at no cost, with an incentive for the earliest participants. If what you want is outage protection and nothing else, that is a hard offer to beat and you should look at it. What it does not do: it is utility-dispatched rather than yours to control, it asks you to host the equipment for ten years, it is designed to run independently of your solar rather than storing your own production, and it is not available on the New Mexico side. If you want a battery that shifts your own solar into the evening under a changing rate structure — or you are in Las Cruces, Santa Teresa, or anywhere on the New Mexico side — the pilot will not do that for you. Ask us either way and we will tell you which fits.
Then you are not ready. Ask your questions, keep our number, and come back when it makes sense for you. Nothing on this page expires.
Questions, no strings: send us a note, or send twelve months of bills and we will send back an honest assessment.
