SOLAR ENERGY IT'S TIME HAS NOT COME
Hi I'm Ralph Owner of RAK Electrical.
Solar energy is a wonderful concept and I would like to supply and install it for my customers. In my opinion though without the massive government rebates and/or grants it would not be feasible. To me doing solar now would be like buying the first radio shack computer (which I did) and have it become obsolete in 4 months.
I read an article today that a company in Africa has a new much thinner collector that would be less to install and more efficient.
RAK is not in the business to just sell, we want to provide products that are proven. Oh I see the adds out "never pay for electricity again", "sell electric to your power company", and of course "reduce your carbon footprint" . Those are great concepts but the truth is that , I believe, we can cut our usage in many ways while we wait for prices to lower and collectors become much more efficient. There are literally hundreds of websites to instruct you how to save energy, so I won't go into detail now about that. I will say though that anything that creates heat electric stove,water heater,toaster oven,hairdryer or cool like refrigerator and air conditioner are the major culprits. Cut their usage and you will cut your bill.
A personal story
I had a company contact me about solar collectors on my house, you know the kind that take the sun and create it directly to energy. They were professional about everything. They brought an engineer to the house and calculated how the sun would hit my roof. The salesman said that they would put a net meter in. A net meter will run backwards when you are producing more energy, from the collectors on your roof, than your home is using. That means the meter will take money off your electric bill when it runs backwards. Everything sounded like a win-win. Then they come back with a proposal to do the work. The work was approximately $80,000.00 dollars. Okay I said how am I going to pay for this? They said I would get $40,000.00 rebate from the utility company and I would have to take out a $40,000.00 equity loan. I got the forms from my utility company and for once actually read them. (not like clicking yes on a user agreement for computer software) What it said was scary, "this rebate can be terminated without notice". So I would have to refinance my house, put on a new roof because you can't put solar collectors on an old roof, and increase my indebtedness a tidy sum. For me it is just too much of a risk. Maybe it will be soon that the math adds up but for now maybe I will buy a hybrid car..Ralph Kennedy
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