3 Numbers Your Solar Salesperson is Hoping You Don't Discover...
The short version: Three numbers decide if your solar deal is fair. A hidden dealer fee. The escalator clause. Panel wear. Your salesperson skips all three. Add them up yourself with our free Solar Reality Check in about three minutes.
A solar salesperson shows you the nice numbers. The low monthly bill. The big savings. The clean roof.
But the real deal lives in the numbers they don't show you. Here are three. Add them up. Then you understand your own deal better than your salesperson does.
Number one: 25 percent
About that much of your system price may go to the salesperson. It is a hidden dealer fee.
Here is how it works. The lender pays the solar company a fee to sign you up. The solar company rolls that fee into your loan. So the price you finance is higher than the system is worth. And you pay interest on the gap for years.
How big is the fee? State records show it runs 15 to 30 percent of the price. We use 25 percent as the middle. Attorneys general in Minnesota and New York have both acted on fees like these.
On a $30,000 system, 25 percent is about $7,500. You finance it. You pay interest on it. And no one tells you it is there. Because if they did, you might walk away.
That is the whole point of hiding it.
Number two: 2.9 percent
That is a common escalator on a solar lease or PPA. Your payment goes up that much every year, for the life of the contract.
It feels harmless when you sign. But it keeps climbing. A $130 payment grows past $230 by year 22. Your savings do not climb with it. So every year, you keep a little less.
Here is the twist. They sell the escalator as protection from rising power prices. But power prices rise about 3 percent a year on average. Many escalators rise just as fast, or faster. So the clause they sell as protection is the clause raising your cost.
The escalator is buried on page 14. Most people never see it. Not until the payment is already big.
Not sure if your contract has one? That is exactly what the free Solar Reality Check looks for. Because the clause you can't find is the one that costs you most.
Number three: 0.5 percent
That is how much power your panels lose each year as they age. Half a percent sounds tiny. But it adds up.
After 20 years, your panels make about 10 percent less than on day one. You were sold the day-one number. You live with the lower numbers that come after.
It gets worse if a tree grows over the roof. Or the panels were sized wrong. Or the roof faces the wrong way. A real shortfall is hard to spot without an audit. Your bill just sits a little higher than promised, year after year. And you never learn why.
They show you year one. You live with year fifteen.
Why you never added them up
These three numbers live in three different places. The dealer fee hides in your loan. The escalator hides in your lease. The panel wear hides in a spec sheet you probably never read.
No one ever puts them in one place. Because together, they tell a story the salesperson does not want you to hear.
So we built a tool that puts them together. Our free Solar Reality Check asks for your real numbers. Then it runs the full math in about three minutes. No login. No sales call.
Run yours at solarhomeadvocate.com/reality-check.
Because a deal you can check is a deal you can trust. And the deal you cannot check is the one to worry about.