Step 2, shopping list

After sizing the system and determining which kinds of sources (and how much of each) you need it's time to compile a shopping list. Below is a list of most of the bits and pieces that went in to our system, hold on to your hats and keep those heart attach pills ready!

The prices listed here are from 2002, make sure you get an up-to-date quote.

After compiling your shopping list you should go and ask for some quotes with suppliers in your neighbourhood.

Now I'm the first one to promote the internet, but in this case I'd like to make an exception. It's *WAY* better to spend a little bit more money 'offline' with your friendly neighbourhood solar installer (who probably has forgotten more about alternative energy installations that you will ever learn), you'll come out better and possibly cheaper than taking the 'high and lonely' road of the net, shop online and find out that your merchant doesn't really care about you anymore once the boxes have left their premises.

Here is an itemized list of all the equipment that went into our installation.
In the near future I will indicate where a cheaper alternative exists compared to what we used when we installed our system, based on EQUAL FUNCTION. So, while you can substitute a modified square wave inverter for a true sine wave inverter that does not give you the same functionality so you will not find it in this list.

Another note about pricing, we explicitly have not tried to shop too much for ever trying to get the absolute best deal. It is my firm belief that you are better off buying the 'failure prone' pieces of your installation from a local dealer to make sure that if something breaks you can throw it at someone that you have access to rather than some faceless internet merchant, to who the interesting port of the transaction (him/her receiving your cold hard cash) is already over.

From someone that has done quite a bit of e-commerce you can take that any way you want it, some stuff is simply better bought off line. So, if you see a price here that you know can be beat by 'joe's online box shovers' please don't let me know about it :)

Items listed as '0' I still need to look up the price we paid for, but
they are not 'big ticket' items so they won't have a big influence on
the grand total.

Prices are in Canadian Dollars (to convert to real money divide by 1.5), excluding taxes, as of September 2002. We'll try to keep track of the developments over time.

Another way to look at cost is to look at the interest you could have made on your money if you had it sitting in a bank account at say 4% (and let me know the name of your bank!), our installation cost roughly $45,000 Canadian (ex tax, so tax included that's about $51,000), at 4% interest that would yield $2000 annually. Our system saves us about $2400 in electricity bills annually, so we figure we're doing pretty good there. And guess what, in the future the power prices are probably not going to go down anytime soon, if history is any guide here I'd say that over the life of the system the price of power will at least double, if not a whole lot worse.

I will also try to keep track of the price of power produced by the system vs. power taken out of the grid.