Hello Umbra and Umbra's readers. A great resource on the topic of making your home energy efficient before installing solar electric panels is Home Energy's special issue, Solar and Efficiency, Meeting the Energy Needs of the 21st Century. You can read it all online for $10. (I admit bias because I am Home Energy's managing editor--but we are the premier resource for objective analysis of trends in energy efficient, affordable, sustainable, and healthy residential construction.)

How much do you know about solar?
In California, the average consumption of electricity is one kwatt.  How much do you use?  
Assume you reduce power consumption to one kwatt.  Then you will need a kwatt system.  At five dollars a watt, that is five thousaand dollars.

The system will procuce one kwatt for about four hours a day, peak sunlight hours of ten to two.  It will produce less other times of day.  So you will need additional power panels, bringing the cost up to about ten thousand dollars.

Then you factor in cloud cover, which averages forty percent.  So you need additional solar panels.

Next, the solar panels produce DC, and your house runs on AC.  You will need a power invertor.  The prices have dropped dramatically, a three kwatt invertor is about three hundred dollars.

Last, you will need batteries to store your power when the sun isn't shining, which costs thousands of dollars.

All told the system could easily run forty thousand dollars.

Now here is how you make one change and reduce the cost by at least ninety percent.

Decades ago a French physicist studying solar cells increased voltaic output by reflecting additional light on the cell.  At the end, he was able to produce an astounding one thousand times the rated output, an increase of one hundred thousand percent!

What does this mean?  Simple - instead of merely mounting solar cells on your roof, install reflecting cells (which cost a fraction of the price) and project the sunlight off the house and onto the solar cells.  This has two benefits.

The first one is obvious - by concentrating the light, we do not need the tens of thousands worth of solar cells.  Can you guess what the second benefit is?  In the summertime, reflecting sunlight off the house eliminates heatbuildup, keeping the house cooler.  The solar system can easily be designed to do a parallel job, reflecting infrared (heat) rays on the west side of the house which will also help keep the house cooler.

I hope you find this encouraging to go solar.

Umbra and Co,

Umbra's suggested considerations are spot on, as usual.  However, there is possible gov't assistance available, depending on your state regs and utility.  Here in Delaware, I may receive a grant towards the installation of PV panels, and this would cover up to $6000.  Also, Uncle Sam offers a $2000 annual tax rebate for those that qualify.  As the ad says, your millage may vary, but you may want to check out if your tax dollars can work for you.

After experimenting with solar power (pv) in an rv, in a bedroom of a house in California, and elsewhere, I decided I had enough info to publish a small book on the subject of "basic solar power," which has now sold to every state in the U.S. and province in Canada (and overseas). (Obviously, the sun radiates--even through clouds--everywhere). You don't have to do solar on a large scale right away--this is my message.  For less than $1000 you can have a system in a bedroom, cabin or garage. This is a DIY project, but I learned that the basic components of a system are not much more complicated than the components of a computer system.  This work has also led me to "discover" the concept of the "garage filling station" which would allow us to fuel our vehicles at home (energybulletin.net) with "green" fuels. For more information see my site at powerfromsun.com.

Well, according to "FindSolar.com" if I outfitted my one bedroom apartment for solar, it would have a ROI better than most of my stocks and mutual funds!

65%

I would save 80.0 tons of CO2.

Installation costs would be $36,000.

However, this is an apartment, so I would think that landlords of these big suburban complexes should really think about solar.

Oh, and on the other side, more people should think about living in big suburban complexes, which are a really nice sweet spot between sprawl and hypercompactness of urbanism, if for no other reason that the seem really primed to be retrofitted to solar, fuel cells, and so on...