My First Week of Making Solar Electricity
In December 2025, we got a photovoltaic (PV) array installed on our roof. I was going to wait longer, but the 30 percent solar tax credit was going away at the end of 2025. We got in just under the wire. Last Monday, 135 days after the installer got the system mounted and all wired up, Georgia Power came out to test the system. We passed and got our Permission to Operate (PTO). And I’ve been making solar electricity ever since.
I’m not an expert in solar energy, I’ve known this resource for decades and have been looking forward to the day when I finally have my own PV array. But one thing that’s happened in the past week still surprised me. Keep reading to find out what it was.
System details
With help from the Solarize Georgia representative, Don Moreland, we landed on this system:
- 9.72 kilowatts (kW) peak capacity
- 26 photovoltaic Silfab PV modules
- Module model number: SIL-380 HC
- Module peak power: 380 watts (W)
- Inverter: solaredge SE11400H-US
- Inverter efficiency: 99%
How, you ask, did I decide on this size system? Well, I knew I had plenty of good solar real estate on our roof. It faces due south with three flat sections and the least shading on the middle section. In fact, I went to Google’s Project Sunroof and discovered that we have the best roof for solar panels in the neighborhood. The photo below shows our (then pollen-covered) solar panels in the large middle section.
The other important factor I needed was our energy use. From July 2022 through June 2023, I tracked my energy use with an Emporia Vue, and it was a bit less than 12,000 kWh. In 2024 and 2025, we used a little over 16,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh). In the six full years we’ve owned the house, we’ve averaged a bit over 14,000 kWh. Last year might be more representative of where we’ll be, though, because we remodeled our basement and now it’s properly heated and cooled.
Energy use and PVWatts modeling
When I made the decision to put solar panels on my roof last August, I went to the PVWatts website to look at what size system might work best. I modeled three peak power capacities: 8 kW, 10 kW, and 12 kW. Here’s what it came up with for our annual energy output for the 10 kW system we went with.
That’s a pretty exciting number. It means we may completely cover our energy use some years and be 10 to 20 percent low other years. I’ll talk more about whether that’s really the right size below.
Week 1 production
You can’t tell a lot from a single week of electricity production. But let me just show you how it’s going so far. First, the rated peak capacity is 9.7 kW. Have we hit that? Yes, but only briefly. It’s been cloudy quite a bit since we started it up. This screenshot of the app shows one time last week when it briefly hit 9.8 kW.
And below is the graph of how we’ve done at making solar electricity for the first eight days.
As of this afternoon (Monday, 11 May), we’ve made more than 300 kWh in a bit more than a week. We’ve had two sunny days where we made nearly 60 kWh in a single day. That’s not the max, though, because we had some cloudiness and haze on each of those days. You can see that in the graph below, which plots energy production for each 15 minutes.
And those dips in what might otherwise be a nice curve aren’t the whole problem. That’s the day I got the screenshot above showing the 9.8 kW peak. But no 15 minute period during the day was more than 8 kW. It’ll be nice to see what our actual maximum daily production can be on a clear, sunny day.
Is 10 kW really the right size?
One issue I haven’t mentioned yet is timing. Most afternoons, we make more solar electricity than we use. At night, we use more than we make. How does that work out with our billing?
Well, Georgia Power isn’t exactly a solar-friendly utility. Few of their customers are allowed into the net metering program. Those who are get paid as much for the energy they sell as for the energy they buy. We don’t get net metering. Our deal is that we get paid about half the price for each kilowatt-hour I sell ($0.07) as what I pay for each kilowatt-hour I buy ($0.14).
Until I add batteries to my system, I don’t want to sell too much to them because of that disparity. I’ve already been forking over extra money for their experiment to show that nuclear power is still too expensive. And now the news has come out that they’re charging the small customers extra to cover the costs of data centers.
So, I’ll add batteries at some point. Then I’ll be able to optimize the whole system so all or most of what I generate goes to our own usage. Meanwhile, we’ll do laundry and other things that need a lot of power when we’re making excess electricity during the day.
Exciting times
Now, about that surprise I mentioned at the beginning. It turns out that making solar electricity is a lot more exciting than I expected. It’s certainly generating the largest financial return on any investment I’ve made in our house. I calculated it’s about 8 percent per year.
But it’s more than just saving money. I love opening the app and seeing how much I’m making at any moment. It’s also thrilling to be contributing clean electricity to the grid. And there’s nothing like driving an electric car on solar electricity!
Allison A. Bailes III, PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consultant, and the founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia. He has a doctorate in physics and is the author of a bestselling book on building science. He also writes the Energy Vanguard Blog. For more updates, you can follow Allison on LinkedIn and subscribe to Energy Vanguard’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel.
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Congrats on getting it installed before the tax credits expired! It’s cool to see the numbers (mostly) tracking what PVWatts estimated for your system size. In Virginia, they recently passed a balcony solar bill which means any homeowner (or even renter) can buy a plug-in solar set-up of up to 1200 watts without any required approvals or permits. It won’t offset much, but like you said, it’ll be awesome to see some of the utility bill offset by clean electricity.
Ryan: I recently heard about Virginia’s balcony solar. That’s great!
Ryan, how does the utility handle back-feeding of power to the grid during outages?
Steve, I believe the plug-in solar units on the market today come with microinverters with anti-islanding features, so the units will shut off if the grid power shuts off.
Allison, I’m curious if you paid for the system upfront? I’m the solar advisor for the cooperative that I work for and I work to educate our members about solar and their expectations from it. The biggest complaint that I get is from members who financed a system and they tell me that with that payment plus what they still have in a power bill, they are paying more than when they just had the power bill. Some, quite a bit more. We do have a buyback program for excess production that pays about half of what the residential rate is. That amount usually goes up a bit each year based on the prior years wholesale power cost.
Just curious.
Jason: Great question. Yes, we paid for it upfront, and $8,000 came back to us as a tax credit. My wife and I are in our 60s, and that means we can withdraw from retirement accounts to cover it. And with an 8% return on investment, our new PV system is really just moving retirement money from one place to another.
I put solar panels on my roof in Las Vegas in 2003. It was a 1.25Kw array — times were different. But oh how I loved going out to my inverter and reading whether I was taking from the grid or feeding it. I used to take my friends out to it and say, “Me and Hoover Dam; feeding the grid.”
Have fun! I’m now in an oak grove under a canopy so complete I can’t have a vegetable garden, so no photovoltaics for me. I did get a new furnace in the last time slot on the last day of 2025, just before those tax credits went away, so I know how sliding in at the wire feels.
Teresa: I got one PV module at the house I built in 2001, and it powered our well pump. I was hoping to a PV array on the roof, too, but I didn’t stay there long enough.
Allison, excellent article! I believe there are residential chargers (or many EVs allow for) scheduled charging. And you can schedule the car to charge during the highest likelihood of peak solar production. Are you doing that?
Chris: No, not yet. Neither our EV or EVSE have that capability. But I’m hoping to upgrade at some point.
Did you consider the extra cost of putting on a new roof when that is needed. Was it possible to pole mount the system (I doubt because is looks really big). For me, the forest is my energy efficiency as we are all shade all the time. We don’t exist on Google Maps satellite view.
Danny: No, I didn’t. Our roof is less than two years old now, so we’d already taken care of that.
Congratulations on the install. I can’t wait to see how it pans out for you with our often hazy humid weather over the coming months. I’m also curious to see how production matches with the late afternoon summer thunderstorms that we often experience in Atlanta.
JC: Stay tuned. I’ll be posting updates. The PVWatts calculator does factor in cloudiness, though. That’s why it shows our highest in May instead of June.
Nice setup. I’ve had solar on my last three homes. In Texas competitive areas you either pay a lot per kWh to have them give you credit for your solar but for a good rate you get wholesale ( usually.02 kWh)and if the provider feels generous you might get a .02-.03 adder.
Our system is a 5kw and we still export energy on sunny days so a battery is really needed to make the most use of it. It currently produces 1/3 of our total usage and we still export energy. Recently a company called Base Energy started offering a battery for just the installation fee to pay the contractor. Then you have a 25kwh battery that they arbitrage the price and give me a .05 for my excess, not great but it’s what you can get. Interesting they put taps on my solar infeed to the breaker box. I am producing more energy using their monitors that I was getting from the utility meter on the house. So I’m getting a bit more energy credits than before.
We have also had a backup generator on a disconnect because of the extended outages we have had in the past few years and you can’t run the generator and the solar at the same time on most systems. The Base battery has a built in inverter so I can hook the portable generator into the battery and it then puts me on a micro grid, my solar array, generator and battery play nicely together. It gives me plenty of time to have the generator put in place and keeps the house powered using much less fuel .Thats a comfort for this old man.
Hopefully they will start putting managed batteries with every solar installation going forward.
David: Sounds like you’ve got a good setup for generation and storage, even if it’s not net metering. I look forward to adding batteries to our system.
Woot! I love looking at the solar production graphs! I had solar installed as soon as I realized the cost of the loan was at, or slightly less than, the overall electric savings. Thank goodness for state policies that allow that to happen more easily.
Jeff: Good for you! A lot of people start thinking about payback even when they paid with a loan, but in that case it’s all about cash flow.
If one sells a house with solar, how well is the investment in the solar system offset by the amount that the seller is willing to (or expected to) offer?
Bob: Good question. I searched online for that last year and don’t recall what the numbers were. It’s not really relevant to me because I plan to stay in the house longer than the simple payback of ~10 years. So my 8% ROI is paying for my system now. The increase in value when we sell will be gravy.
Some solar providers in my area (Washington, DC) are offering a Deferred Ownership Agreement so that homeowners can still get a discount up to 30%. It’s a bit complicated, but basically commercial companies are eligible for up to 30% federal tax credit for purchasing and installing solar. By installing on your roof as a “lease” for six years, the solar company can claim the tax credit and pass those savings on to their residential customer. Definitely worth asking around for those inspired by Allison’s story.
Nicole: I was under the mistaken impression that all solar tax credits that could apply to residential systems were ended at the end of last year. Your comment made me do a search, where I found out that you can still get some tax credits, but as you wrote, it’s complicated. Here’s an article from enphase, a solar equipment maker:
https://enphase.com/blog/homeowners/solar-tax-credit-updates-obbb
I am curious what the payback would have been if you didn’t get the rebate.
Roy: I can’t find my original calculations right now, so I’ll have to try to recreate them if they don’t turn up. I think I did it both ways last August but can’t remember what it was without.
congrats on the solar, more so the PTO 🙂
I’m assuming you use a heat pump water heater to knock off 3,000kWh +
If you can use some of the non UL listed batteries they are very reasonable, this guys Youtube is interesting. https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse
There are many factors that contribute to net cost: capital equipment, installation, maintenance, repair, system life, daily solar power available, annual conversion efficiency, etc. One factor that is often overlooked – ROI of the cost of capital equipment, installation, etc. that was expended at the time of installation, i.e., if the home owner paid the PV Solar contractor $10K and the system lasts 20 years then one has to compute the ROI on that $10K expenditure, over that same period., e.g., 10K at 4% annual return for 20 years is ~$12K ROI. That $12K is part of the system cost.
Bill: Thanks for adding that. And just so it’s clear to everyone, that $12k isn’t a cost. It’s the amount that comes back to you in energy savings. And in your example, it more than covers the system cost (assuming no maintenance or repairs).
Been on solar since 2019. While we have a less optimal roof (mostly west facing), we are able to generate all the electricity we need on an annual basis and this includes the PHEV we charge almost daily.
Due to the less than optimal roof layout and trees, and the older panels, our system uses more panels than yours. However, SC has in place some really good tax rebates on solar and coupled with the Feds, we got 50% of it back.
Also, at that time, Duke was offering a good net metering program. They changed it last year, so we will see how it pans out in 2026. Because we have net metering, batteries are not in the picture at this time. We do have a NG powered generator (not whole house) in case of an outage (infrequent)
I can say, it is sooooo nice not to have to worry rate increases!
Norman: Sounds like a great setup. It’s even better than not having to worry about rate increases. Rate increases actually make the ROI better.
Congrats for going solar!
We pulled the trigger as well, getting an array in service in time for the credit.
I’m allergic to roof penetrations, so ours is freestanding – shades our driveway
My next project is to deploy an Emporia Vue / pro EV charger that tracks excess solar power and automatically varies power flow into an EV so as to only use excess solar.
I already have a charger (Grizzl-E) whose current is adjustable on the fly, but doing that manually has gotten old especially now that summer cloudy weather is setting in – array output varies by 1000s of Watts over the course of only a few seconds as clouds come and go.
Curt: Congrats on yours, too! It’s an amazing feeling. And yeah, I’m with you on the roof penetrations, but we didn’t have any good alternatives.
We’ve had our 7kW solar for around 5 years now (replacing an older 1kW! system).
It’s paired with out 40kWh battery which means during summer we effectively have no imported electricity. The panels aren’t sited the best (mainly facing NE in Australia) and in the lee of a hill with surrounding trees so not much production until 10am most of the time, and worse in winter).
Still it’s nice to have them. Soon we’ll be replacing our roof mounted HWS with an on ground model giving us more usable space for panels.
Dale: That’s great! Are you going with a fixed or tracking mount? Also, what does HWS stand for?
Fixed – much cheaper than tracking, and simpler to install on a roof. In Australia solar is just so cheap it makes sense to put more on the roof than spend the money on tracking systems (10kWh system is around $10,000/$US7300).
HWS = Hot Water System. The existing system has been running for around 25 years and is finally starting to corrode (stainless steel tank, but galvanised exterior), so we’ll probably replace it with a heat pump. However a straight resistive heater (although not efficient) is tempting as they are extremely cheap, simple and completely silent.
Wait a minute! Are you saying a 10 kW PV system—not just the modules, but the whole system with mounting, inverters, and everything—is that price? Dang! It’s still a great price even if it’s just the modules.
Yes that’s the price for the entire system – including installation. Solar is incredibly cheap in Australia – as a result around 40% of -all- homes have solar.
The government has induced demand through initially large rebates which are designed to fade out over a number of years to ensure a domestic industry is built up that is capable of doing the installations extremely quickly and cheaply.
The government has also launched a home battery rebate system so popular that in March of this year Australian homes accounted for 9% of the -total- worldwide battery installations [1]. In fact it’s been so popular it has had to be scaled back :-).
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-home-battery-installations-equal-to-almost-10-pct-of-global-utility-capacity-brought-online-in-march/
Assuming that there is adequate space for the panels, does it make any sense at all to install two arrays, with one optimized for, and enabled during winter, and the other optimized for and enabled during summer? The “winter” array could be larger in order to help make up for the difference in solar radiation.
Panels have become so cheap that people are installing them pretty much anywhere they can on their roofs.
Instead of just north facing (south for those in the northern hemisphere) people are putting them on east/west to capture energy for peak consumption times.
Most people however don’t really have the luxury of choosing where to put the panels because of roof geometry (sometime very complicated) and overshadowing by trees, neighbouring houses etc..
Even if an array is optimized for a certain exposure, it will make SOME electricity even when not optimal – might as well leave both energized unless there’s some feed in capacity limitation.
We put 7KW on our roof in northeast Florida, with two Tesla Powerwall 2s in the garage. FPL was still offering net metering then, they may still, I don’t know. We were 85% self-sufficient over the five years we were there. That is, 15% of our power came from FPL when there wasn’t enough sunlight to recharge the batteries. We sent more than that to the grid, so our cost for that 15% was nothing. FPL persuaded the Florida legislature to authorize a fee for maintaining a grid connection. So we paid $27 a month to use FPL as our backup power system
It’s nice to receive power wirelessly from a remote off-site fusion reactor many people call “the sun.”
We’re in New York now, in the Finger Lakes. I’m nearing 70 and I watched the faces of all the folks my age in St Petersburg as they carried everything they owned to the curb after Helene passed by, saying, “It’s never flooded here before.”
It’s a small risk in any given year to lose everything to a natural disaster. But hurricane disasters are widespread events. You will be recovering along with tens of thousands of your neighbors. All competing for FEMA’s resources, the county’s attention, contractors, insurance adjusters, building materials. That makes the consequences of that small risk enormous. We decided we didn’t want to do that anymore.
We’re building an ICF home here on 2 acres of land at 1450′ elevation, not in a flood zone. Worst risk will be straight-line winds of 100mph.
We’ll have solar once we finish the house and review the budget. For now, we’re building the most energy efficient home we can afford.
I’ve been working on reducing loads and upgrading my home via conservation for years.
Your 14,000 kWh annual would feed my home for 3+years.
My 2025 total was 4024 kWh for $1235.
I dont live in the cold and dark. Or sweat in the summer heat.
I look to install solar some day. Just don’t see a payback before I’m dead.
PSEG has raised rates in April. Latest bill was 39.4 cents a kWh, all fee’s included.
Payback on upgrades to electronics, lighting, cooking, A/C, dehumidifier
have mostly paid back 100% in less than 5 years.
Payback is much higher returns than 8%.
While I have reduced my electric usage by 33% in past 10years.
My PSEG bill never seems to go down much. NY is not a solar backfeed friendly state.
I bet you could cut 10+% of your electric load. And, get a faster payback on your solar.
Look forward to more info on your systems progress.
Toy: Do you heat with electricity?
I have been planning a pv installation for my home and like this solar power meter that I bought on Amazon for $75 to measure the solar power that will hit my roof. The meter data logs and has worked very well. https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Power-Meter-Weather-Resistant-Irradiance/dp/B0FVFF69F6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
I was surprized to see that solar radistion can be about 800 w/m2, which is a lot of energy if you think back to the heat produced by an old 100w light bulb.
I live near you and there are the remains of two hydroelectric generators on the Emory University campus that 120 years ago supplied power to the mansions of Candler family, founders of Coca-Cola. Its great that you are now able to get free power like they did, but do not have to be filthy rich to afford a modern solar generating system.