6th Income Source

6th Income Source

Good Morning

Happy Festivus, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and just happy holidays. I hope you all had a great time with friends and family, gained a couple pounds from all the food and Santa spoiled ya. The holidays are always crazy here, we basically run around from Christmas eve til the 30th. This year I got a break, since I needed to stay home.

We got our Solar Panels hooked up finally! (The 27th) Yes a real Christmas miracle. This has been a extremely lengthy process considering we signed the dotted line in the middle of May. While everything is still not finalized we are officially generating power now and will get paid for it. This is now our 6th Income source. Woot Woot…



Snow Problems?

Here in Ontario we have got a lot of snow. I mean a lot of snow. It’s kinda funny cause now that we have the system I can go both ways. I wanted a real winter this year. Its currently minus 30 out – my husky doesn’t even want to stay outside! While that is fantastic for our ice rink, the snow isn’t packing snow and most of our solar panels are covered in a thick layer of snow.

Currently I can see approximately half of 4 panels. We have this little unit beside the computer (size of modem) with a lcd screen. It shows how much wattage is on, the number of inverter’s working and total power generated. In less than half a day we have generated .21 kwh. Yes not even 28 cents…… haha. I mentioned before that I would be that guy on the roof clearing the snow off the panels. Screw that! I wont be that guy its not worth sliding off the whole roof although it is tempting!

I have done a couple posts in the past about the process but will post a bit about it.

Income

Our Solar Panels

The whole system has 30 panels on the roof. 10 are on the south side and 20 are on the west side. Ideally you want all south side but our south side roof didn’t have that much square footage. The panels have a 25 year warranty on them all.

We decided to go with micro inverter’s vs string inverter’s. It does cost more but the advantage of micro far outweighs strings in my opinion. Micro inverter’s are every 2 panels vs every 10 with string. This means if one panel doesn’t work well (broken, bird shit or tree shading) it might lower the generation of the 2 panels on the micro inverter vs the 10 on the string inverter. All of these Inverter’s have a 25 year warranty on them.

Most people are worried about their roof when installing solar panels. All the racking is installed with flashing to prevent leaks and also comes with a 20 year warranty. We have critter guard around all the panels. This is basically a heavier duty chicken wire that prevents squirrels or whatnot from nesting or hanging out under the panels. We also have a networking hub (that modem box i talked about above) it connects to the whole system and tells us the details. I can even log in online and see more detailed information on the system.

Income

Costs

The whole system cost $30,860 taxes in plus a $1500 connection fee from Hydro one. If I setup a business for our solar panels I can get the taxes back, something I still need to look into. Our house insurance used to be 74 bucks a month but when trying to get extra insurance for the solar panels they cut me off. (said I was now commercial) We shopped around and went with Allstate which actually gave us better insurance including the solar panels for 74 bucks a month. Without the solar panels it would of been $54 a month. So basically an extra $20 a month for the insurance on the house although we won’t realize that extra cost since we were paying the same before.

The system should generate roughly $3,000 per year with a 20 year contract. After that we can decide to feed our own home or negotiate another contract with Hydro one. Most likely at a even higher rate since prices in 20 years are almost guaranteed to be a lot more.

Arg….

The whole process was a lengthy one, and our supplier/ installer definitely could of been more efficient and got us setup a lot earlier. Ie they said everything would be good to go after building permit (End of October) after waiting for that they sent me forms from Hydro one dated the beginning of July which we could of filed out in July……. then 2 weeks later oh sorry I forgot to send you this form……..

Income

Conclusion

Anyways other than some minor paperwork and cutting the final cheque, it is all setup. We are now generating power to the grid. It feels good to be green and we look forward to seeing that first hydro one deposit! This is now our 6th Income source Pretty impressive, since when I started this site in February we had only 3. Thanks everyone for keeping me on my game and teaching me something new everyday.

Now if it can only be sunshine and rainbows everyday… O.k the odd hard rain day to clean the shit off the panels!

Cheers Everyone!

12 Responses

  1. Congrats on adding a new income stream. Now you will have an extra $3k per year to invest, save or whatever you want to do with it. All the best in the new year 🙂

  2. dividendgeek says:

    Congrats mate! Nice diversification. I am still working 7 different income sources. We are 3. I would love to have solar panels, can’t do it in our condo. Still interested in solar farms 🙂

    • Hey Geek. Thanks! Yeah definitely a fan of the diversification. 3 sources is better than 2! Solar farms are interesting… about 10 years back the town was looking for investors with a 10% rate of return but we werent financially secure then. Keep on doing what your doing. Havent you monetized your blog though? That would be a 4th source wouldnt it?

      • Pellrider says:

        Hi PCI, great work with solar panels! Like Divgeek, I also cannot put solar panels on the condo. I bit the bullet and purchased the domain. But I have no clue how to monetize the blog other than adding google ad words.

        • Hey pell. Yeah we used to be condos….. haha. You can start by getting google adsense and adding the code they give into each page you writeup. Affiliates are another source of income! Best of luck. I used youtube alot to learn best wordpress apps etc.

  3. That’s a great milestone! Your solar power is finally up an running. From what I understood, are you going to sell 100% of power generated for the next 20 years? Or you sell a portion and the rest portion you use for yourself? Too bad for your old insurance company. It’s certainly not a commerce.

    • Hey income. Sorry I should of clarified. Yes 100% of the power will be being sold to hydro one. We get paid a higher rate then we pay for hydro at the moment. Yeah was weird about the insurance company but worked out better!
      Cheers

  4. Rosie says:

    How awesome!! Keep us posted on your returns!

  5. Congrats on that 6th income source. The hard part is done. So, now you get to reap the benefits of all the hard work. Happy New Year.

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