SunRun’s 8th customer guest post comes from Rob in Kalapana, HI. Check it out to see why Rob chose to go solar with SunRun, and for his thoughts on the solar experience. If you’re a SunRun customer and interested in contributing a guest post to our blog, please email customers@sunrunhome.com. We’re eager to add new voices to our online solar community and we look forward to hearing from you!
Having moved to the Big Island of Hawaii from the Bay Area in 2008, I was looking forward to more environmentally sustainable life – growing my own food, consuming less, getting my water from the rain through a catchment system. I built my own home and budgeted for solar hot water, but installing a solar power system would have meant major sacrifices in the design of my home. While in time solar panels would have paid for themselves I did not have the money up front and wouldn’t have qualified for all the tax breaks since I had no income the year I built my house. Going solar seemed impossible unless I wanted to take out a loan to do so.
In Hawaii, and the Big Island in particular, we not only pay about the highest electrical rates in the nation, we also get almost all of our energy from imported diesel fuel. Knowing that everything has to be shipped thousands of miles to get here, the most isolated inhabited land mass on the planet, it has always seemed crazy to me that we don’t get more of our power from the sun.
When my partner and I first heard that SunRun was starting to provide solar in Hawaii, we contacted them immediately and became one of their first customers to have a system installed on the Big Island. We were skeptical about the savings, and honestly were not motivated by it anyway. We wanted to dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels and our contribution to all the problems related to them. Now that we’ve had our system a few months, the initial estimates of what we would save have been extremely accurate, maybe even conservative. Our energy use increased since our initial estimate since I had begun working at home right before the panels were installed. Our total electrical bills went from $100-135 to only $90 since our SunRun home solar system was turned on. Over time that difference will increase dramatically. This past month our utility meter actually went backwards since we fed more solar power into the grid than we used from it! The savings will start to increase every time our utility increases rates, which has seemed pretty frequent since I’ve lived here.
After signing the paperwork we really didn’t have to do much until the system was installed. The local installer SunRun works with took care of everything from design, to permits, to installation.
SunRun really makes solar feasible for so many homeowners, especially here in Hawaii. Lest you think it only works because it’s “sunny Hawaii,” we actually live in one of the wettest areas in the state, getting about 100 inches of rain per year versus around 20 inches where I lived in California. Even so, from the moment we turned our system on, late on a cloudy day with the sun on the opposite side of the house from our panels, we were able to see our meter show we were generating electricity and keeping greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere!
For us, SunRun was a no brainer and we’re very happy with the results. Mahalo SunRun.
Rob and Bob
Kalapana, Hawaii
