“My parents put the first set of 10 panels on. That was good for the time being with just my parents living in the house. Since then we’ve built an extension to our home and there’s a lot more things going on, a lot more people living in the house now and also we have an electric car.”
“That drove our electric bill up to about $400 a month even with the existing 10 panels.”
With a grandfathered-in Net Energy Metering (NEM) agreement with Hawaiian Electric, Keane K. of East Oahu had no viable options for expanding upon the original 10-panel system his family installed in 2011 until the NEM+ program was announced in 2018.
Even before the program was officially launched in late 2018, Keane started a conversation with SunPower by Eco Solar system designer Matt Householder.
“Matt was super proactive with the rest of the Eco Solar team, as soon as the NEM+ program was announced, they shot in the plans for permitting.”
Keane worked closely with Matt to design a system that would fit the family’s pattern of mostly nighttime power consumption, including plugging in an electric car after 5:00 PM every day. He decided on 23 SunPower E-Series 327W panels feeding two Tesla Powerwall batteries.
“To have the ability to store that power was a huge deal for us. You don’t even have to think about it, there’s no switching, it just does it automatically. So when the sun comes up, it powers my house and charges my battery so at night the house is just running off all the battery power that was generated during the day.”
Now, Keane and his family are able to power their house completely with solar while also enjoying the benefits of emergency battery backup.
“So far, the NEM+ program is working great for my family and I, almost all of last year we were paying close to $400 a month on our electric bill.”
“It’s been two months since we’ve had the panels up and the batteries installed, so far we’ve been zeroed out, we’ve actually had a small credit from our existing system – not much – but that tells me the sizing of the system, all the engineering that went in to make this happen was perfect.”
“All in all, I would definitely recommend SunPower by Eco Solar to anyone who is looking for just a great crew of people. A great company that’s going to do an awesome job of installing and taking care of you along the way.”