Issues Concerning Your Home

Your Home

So what happens to your property? Does the appraised value go up and do your taxes go up? Will the house be easy to sell? Can you obtain a mortgage with a PV system on your roof or on your land. Is insurance available?

These are important questions that must be considered.

There are consequences to going Solar. The PV System is sitting either on your property or on the roof and provides income for a profit, so what happens when you sell the house. Hard to tell as this is really early in the game and not many properties that either have Solar PV or are part of the Ontario MicroFIT program have been put up for sale and been sold as far as I can tell. I would imagine that there are similar issues in other countries such as Germany, the U.K, Australia etc.

When I called my bank manager to ask about obtaining a mortgage for a house that has a system on its rooftop, he said he would have to refer it to head office. He directed me to the company that does his appraisals and I spoke to the manager of this particular branch. He knew nothing about Solar PV and asked me to describe it to him so he would have some knowledge in case he is asked to appraise a house

http://greenhomesforsale.ca/

Expectations are that the house will be worth more if sold within the microFIT contract period. It’s like having a tenant in the house so therefore has increased the value. But by how much is the question. I’ve also asked real estate professionals and have never received a definitive answer as to what to expect. This part doesn’t give that warm cozy feeling. The other issue is that prospective buyers may be scared away by the perceived complexity of the equipment and nature of the process. There are those out there though that are drawn to renewable, energy conservation and your house would fit the bill.

Insurance

Roof top solar modules fire in Australia

I had thought obtaining insurance at a reasonable rate would be easy. Was I wrong! My present company does not insure PV, however the broker that I deal with suggested another company which quoted on insuring my house at a cost of $700 per year just for the array! Yikes! Then my search began. To be honest I didn’t do an exhaustive search but TD Insurance immediately knew what MicroFIT was and the quote was very reasonable, in fact lower than my present insurance. I obviously had been paying to much!

So who exactly insures PV in Ontario? I found 2 companies TD and another one at $700 per year. If you are presently insured by another company, please let me know and I will compile a list, so in future years we can get competitive quotes and share the knowledge. I found it quite difficult to locate insurance companies that insure PV on the Net so this would be a help to everyone.

As well, if you are in another country or province, I would love to hear your story.

There is another aspect of this which I find troubling. There have been a number of fires in Ontario on rooftops with solar systems on them. Not many, but enough to catch my interest. There have been fires in other countries as well. There are a variety of reasons for the fires (please read the pdf on the link below) which include, poor installation practices, incorrect hardware used and arc faults to name a few. In the United States, NEC (National Electrical Code) have come out with a specification called NEC 2011 ARC Fault requirements which force manufacturers to include arc fault protection protection through their devices.

• written to detect and interrupt “series” arc-faults in modules, connections, wiring, and other components 
• requires inverters, charge controllers or other devices in the arcing circuit to be disconnected and disabled 
• requires manual resets and reconnects once an arc is detected and fixed.

One inverter/optimizer system that meets this specification is Solaredge and some SMA devices do as well.

http://www.ibc.ca/en/Home_Insurance/documents/brochures/MicroFIT_brchr.pdf
http://energy.sandia.gov/wp/wp-content/gallery/uploads/Bower-2011_Arc_Fault_Update-Oct2010.pdf

The point is that as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, installation is very important, not only from an equipment point of view (it doesn’t blow off for example) but from a safety point of view. If PV fires become a bigger problem, the insurance companies will take notice and you will find rates going up or finding an insurance company to insure your system will become more difficult than it already is.

Heating & Cooling

There was a study done in 2012 (Home Energy Magazine July 2012) that examined in the San Diego area a solar pv roof installation and its affect on heating and cooling. Overall it found that in summertime, having a rooftop solar installation provided a net benefit of 3-5% on reduced cooling needs, while in the winter the heat loss cooling affect balanced out. Keep in mind this is San Diego not the northern U.S or Canada. Still over a 20 year MicroFIT contract saving would be noticeable especially with summers getting longer and warmer.