The solar lease places sound great! They even advertise in my state, however when you call them they don't service my area. Want to bet it's lack of Govt. incentives making it too expensive for them just as it does me? I'd make the capital outlay myself but it's too damned expensive right now.

No, tax credits and incentives are a GOOD idea. Yeah, short term we break even but long term when the hardware is paid off and still producing power and more plants don't have to be built it's a win win for everyone. We need more distributed power generation, people cannot afford to do it without help.

Only if we use white panels

That's a standard grid-tie design and isn't poor design at all if you have a reliable grid - which most of us do. It's also an economical design given the costs and requirements of purchasing and maintaining a battery bank.

FALSE and FUD to boot. Solar panels return more power than was used to produce them and they do not die at the 20year mark, in fact many come with 30 year warranties and are still ticking at the end of that period. EROI is the term you're looking for and you're wrong about it.

http://www.solareworld.com/solar-learning-center/myths-and-facts-of-solar-panel-systems

Stop spreading FUD.

Now if I could just find someone like you who's levelheaded and knowledgeable about this in my area willing to design and install a system without cleaning out my account. No State incentives here but I've got a tin roof South facing with zero shading begging to be covered in the damn things. :-(

Yeah, no chance any of us have been studying this for years. I do not think you understand the problem nearly as well as you think you do.

The long view is to obviously go for solar, it makes sense in many ways. However the long view is VERY long. I pay less than $150 for my power each month, lose power seldom, and due to virtually no offered incentives would have to pay around $30K for a decent grid-tie system. If I could completely eliminate my power bill it would pay for itself in 8 years - surprisingly short actually. But what could I do with that $30K otherwise? Lots of things. This is why so few are jumping on this, I know of no one local to me that's done it. My home is ideal for this however and I'm watching this carefully hoping to do it but not if it's going to cost me $30K, that much money could be doing other things for higher ROI. Get it down to $15K or less and I'm on it. I fully agree that not having people go solar is stupid but our Govt. apparently doesn't see fit to push people that way despite the long term benefits and I cannot easily afford to do it on my own. Hell where I live no one stays in their home long enough to reap the long term benefits of going solar....

Oh and no way do I want a few K lbs of lead acid batteries in my home. Space is an issue, fumes, maintenance, and replacement costs all add up. I'd end up with them in a separate shed if I did this - yuck.

A/C isn't critical but asking people to go days and days when humidity is 80+%, temps are in the 90s+, and they have small children or elderly in the home and you might change your tune. Those kinds of conditions are what people were dealing with after than storm - it was nasty! Everywhere you looked windows were open and everyone was panting.

Most generator installs designed for a home are going to be natural gas and for short-term outages far cheaper than a solar install that was built for off-grid usage. Batteries require maintenance and often watering too. They take up space and weigh a great deal, you have fumes to consider as well. Running a home for days on just batteries isn't going to happen, panels are going to be needed or a generator. In that area (VA) there's zero state incentives for solar purchase, only the pittance from the Fed is available. Cost to install grid-tie would likely hit $30K for a normal sized home and probably double that for the ability to be run off-grid. Power fails seldom and most don't have power bills North of $150. Figure out the ROI and you can see why no one is jumping on this in VA. I know someone in Texas though who got both Fed and State incentives, his install cost him about $8K grid-tie, and he's saving about $100 a month. Now THAT I would be willing to do but $20K++? Forget it. Panels may have become cheaper but total system cost doesn't appear to have moved much at all...

You ought to read some of the electrical requirements for installing panels, it's not as cut and dry as you make it sound and the rules are changing as more things are learned. Read Home Power magazine to see the updates as they come. Everything from wiring strategy, to grounding, to mounting, and everything in between is covered. This is no dish install to do it right and since the panels generate power it's something you want to do right to say the least!

While it's true that solar panels have dropped they are still expensive and in many states there are few to no incentives offered to help defray the costs. The permitting issues he raises are also valid. If it were easier and there were incentives I'd be happy to spend a pile but as it stands now lack of incentives means few installs in my state and thus even fewer installers.

Also, this guy is an idiot. The fact is that panels on every single home would NOT prevent power failures unless they all also had battery banks which drive costs through the roof. Grid-tie systems are what most people install, surprise grid-tie relies on those very same copper wires this guy is crying about being fragile. I'd REALLY like to know what he means by "wired so they provide power when the grid fails" because without batteries this simply isn't feasible unless he thinks everyone should seriously upsize whatever solar install they might have planned. If he thinks that everyone should backfeed the power system then he also doesn't understand how dangerous this is. When a generator is hooked to the system in a power failure homes are disconnected from the grid in order to avoid killing power workers and from frying the generator as it tries to power the whole block. Trying to do this with panels alone isn't likely to have a better result. Grid-tie homes lose power just like everyone else, few have arrays and inverters big enough to power the entire home - their meters spin backwards at low loads only. Certainly batteries are an option but they require maintenance, have replacement costs, weigh a ton - sometimes literally, and can triple the cost of an install which is already damned high. If you're in the boonies and the power company wants $30K to string you a wire they make sense otherwise no you stick to relying on a grid connection. Power a few circuits for lights, say via LED, or other small things sure but you're not going to be powering a whole home on just panels without some storage and more complexity. Most systems aren't sized big enough to power everything except at peak power output which is a small portion of the day. Off-grid systems marshall their inputs into batteries to allow for occasional peak usage, he doesn't seem to understand that.

I don't think this guy has really thought through what he wants. He sees solar and thinks it's magic pixie dust, it's not. When the infrastructure breaks this stuff doesn't magically solve the problem. I'm all for more solar and putting it on everyone's roofs is a great idea but it's not going to solve the basic infrastructure fragility issue and might actually make it worse.

My experience is that nearly everyone overestimates their PSU needs and it becomes a game of "who's is bigger?". This is a stupid way to pick hardware. My desktop runs a 650, my ESX server with 24+ bays runs an 850. If I had a way better video card in the desktop I might move to a 750 and I wouldn't run dual cards.

My HTPC with ion chipsets use 9-16 watts at the wall at 100% usage.

The design choices that manufacturers make in order to meet these levels of effeciency have other impacts. Active power management, cooling fans that only run when needed, and higher quality components are all good reasons to consider a higher effeciency rated PSU. My computers often run 24x7 for years on end so I tend to choose decent PSU.

Also, just as a data point, I have a 4U box running a Xeon, 32gig of RAM, many cooling fans, 3x SAS cards, an SSD, and at least 20x HDD. It has a gold rated PSU listed as 850watts. Oh yeah, integrated onboard video. Usage at the plug? With all drives spinning actively it uses right at 200watts! Less when unRAID spins drives down, none of the drives are "green". The number surprised me!

And are living with screwed up metadata too if that's the case. I start with CDDB and make corrections from there! I love it when disk one is labeled differently than Disk 2, or some other screwed up thing. Correcting metadata for one CD isn't hard, correcting it for 400+ after some asshat like you makes a mess sucks!

He's worried that his old drive, which has already seen a great deal of use, isn't going to survive long enough to finish. He might also be wanting to do this with more than one drive at once - I always do - which means he needs more drives...