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Will my Sunrun home be off the grid?

Jameson explains how Sunrun homes are powered by the sun and connected to the grid.

Solar video transcript

Hi, my name is Jameson and I'm an Account Manager with Sunrun. I'm here today to answer the question: Will my home be off the grid?

All Sunrun homes are actually grid tied, so you do stay connected to the grid. In fact the only way to be off the grid is to get a battery back-up. But typically a battery back-up costs a lot of money and there's also a lot of maintenance involved as well.

The benefit to staying connected to the grid is to take advantage of a process called net metering. Let me show you how that works. The sun is going to hit the solar panels and is going to produce electricity your home is using. Now, any sort of additional electricity that your home isn't using is going to be sent back to the grid, and is going to give you a positive credit.

So now you can think of the grid as a bank where you're storing these credits, so at night time when your system isn't producing electricity and you need to turn on the lights, turn on the T.V. or use any other sort of additional electrical appliance, you are simply going to be pulling out electricity from that grid. And that's how the process of net metering works.