Advice needed. We live in Northern California (greater Sacramento area) with great sun exposure and lots of AC usage. We purchased a new high-end HVAC system in May that did an excellent job this summer. The previous 12 months energy usage was only 5,050kwh for a 2,300 sq. ft. house. With the big HVAC upgrade, I expect our annual consumption to decrease even further as October through May were with the older HVAC system that was not nearly as efficient, however, it is difficult to quantify at this point.
With that said, I want to purchase solar panels for both financial reasons and environmental reasons. I'm hugely incentivized to do this by the end of 2019 to take advantage of the 30% tax credit before it gets slightly reduced. I plan to purchase outright and pay cash. I will not be financing, and I definitely won't be leasing or doing any type of power purchase arrangement nonsense where I don't own the panels.
Having said that, I've shared my detailed month-by-month usage with a few vendors and they are ALL recommending a system that produces ~105% of our actual usage. When I used PG&E's solar tool, they recommended a system with only 85% of our usage. Obviously, each solar panel that you purchase costs more money, and has less marginal improvement based on PG&E's tiered pricing structure. Whenever I push on the sales rep about why they are suggesting such a big system, they always turn it around that they always recommend more than 100% so that we could get more comfortable and use more electricity and not have to worry. They are obviously incentivized to sell more panels, so I immediately have a distaste for their sales tactics.
With all that said, when I try to google how big of a system should I buy, I just get blasted with a slew of advertisements for different solar companies. I can't seem to find any unbiased advice. So, do you have any recommendations on where to find unbiased advice on solar system sizing? Or do you have any unbiased advice yourself?
Please share! Thanks in advance!