How We Found the Right Solar Partner

Video Transcript

So we have 9.5 kilowatt solar on top of the roof, and then that’s connected to a 15 kilowatt Franklin battery. Our motivation for going solar right now had to do with a few different things. Our number one motivation was cost reduction. Our power bill has been climbing up and up and up, and then we saw a neighbor put some solar on his house a few months ago, so that encouraged us to look into it a little bit more seriously.

And then it became clear that Congress was going to get rid of the 30% tax credit at the end of this year. So what we were going to do, we wanted to make sure that we got it in so that our payback period was as quick as possible.

I got about five or six different estimates and found that there were a combination of national companies that will kind of outsource installation to you. And then I found that there were some more local installers either in the Atlanta area or North Georgia or even Southeast Regional.

It became important to us to find somebody that was closer to us physically. You know, the warranties behind equipment is of course really important, but the secondary part is the warranty that an installer will provide on their work. Being able to have somebody close to us in the case that there was a problem that could come out and be responsive to our needs was really important to us.

Outside of that, it was just, you know, talking to the different salespeople and engineers that Better Tomorrow employs that just made us feel comfortable with them as a company. They seem like they care about what they do, they seem to care about their customers, and they seem like they’re gonna be around for a while.

It helps out the energy. When Better Tomorrow came out to install the system, they also had been in close contact with Franklin, the battery manufacturer. And I reached out to Franklin as well. And Franklin was good enough to send a representative for our install. It took two days. They sent two teams, one team working on the battery and the Franklin smart home stuff.

Another team came out at the same time, started installing the panels on the roof. And they worked all day, two days. And by the end of that second day, everything was up and running, which I was really surprised by that.

We were already making our own power after just say first, think about like what is making you curious about solar? What is your main motivation? For us, again, the number one thing was long-term cost we consider this is our long-term home.

We saw our energy costs creeping up and up and up. We wanted a little bit more control over there we’re not gonna produce enough to have a zero energy bill every month, but we can already see evidence that over half of what we were paying last month is what we’re going to pay this month.

And that feels great. On top of that, we think our energy costs are going to be more consistent. So instead of having the huge fluctuation in the summer and the relatively low cost in the winter, now it’s going to be much more evened out, which makes us feel good.

And then the last thing was adding the battery was important to us because we’ve been in a couple of power outages. It’s not too much of a problem around here, but you know, sometimes we work from home, and in the event of a long-term power outage, having our battery, being able to produce our own power would allow us to keep working and keep functioning like normal.

And I think if anybody cares about, if they’re gonna be in a long-term situation in their house, and they care about reducing and stabilizing their power consumption and their costs, or they experience power outages, this is a really good way to do it.