we're going solar today!

no joe and i are not glorified tree huggers, and we really dont stress about what type of earth we are leaving for our great great grandchildren. but we ARE interested in saving money that we fork out every month for electricity. for those of you who do not live in bakersfield during the summer, it might be hard to imagine $300 a month bill just to keep the house cool, but those of you who are local know exactly what im talking about!! so before we bought this house we played with the idea of getting solar panels put on our next house. we contacted a couple solar companies and had them come out and give us their sales pitch and tell us what everything would cost and how much it would save us. so we decided to go with REC Solar to install 30 solar panels on our new house. rather than forking out the full $30k for the system they offer this third party company called SunRun where you pay half the price up front and then basically lease the equipment from them and buy the solar energy back from them at a discounted fixed rate. plus then that company is responsible for maintaining the equipment for 18 years. after the 18 years we pay $4k to buy the equipment from SunRun and just use our own energy. So once we're all up and running our house will be producing about 700kwh of electricity each month to help offset our bills. if we use less than that, we get a credit (kinda like cingular with the rollover minutes) and if we use more then we just pay the difference. the whole thing should pay for itself within 5-7 years too. so its a totally good investment not to mention it totally increases the value of our house too!! they're putting up the panels today so i'll take some pics of the final product tomorrow. but just had a few minutes and thought i should put a post out there for ya all. oh and next week we should find out if we're having a boy or a girl!!!