Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it's not doing anything fancy like sun-tracking.
We also paid no extra insurance for the panels.
One of the best decisions we ever made. We just recently sold the house and it is true the panels gave no extra bump to the sales price but the new owners are ecstatic which is also a warm fuzzy.
Of course, it isn't required to offer a lease in order to also offer a warranty, which is the real solution here.
To be clear, I don't think that is true and I really don't think very many people should actually agree to lease deals. They are almost always bad for the consumer.
That being said, their monthly cost is fixed so it's more a philosophical issue for me. I may still just buy it outright someday, especially if I want to expand it.
Bolting solar panels to the roof is not viable in the long run, IMO. The damage and the advancement of tech means these things will be obsolete in the near term.
Sometimes, getting it on a lease contract works out much cheaper, but the situation could be different in the USA -- for starters, as the article mentions, solar is quite subsidized in other countries (although in my case, I'm speaking about Europe), and startups / small businesses that deal with solar are also subsidized (except Spain, which recently changed in unpopular ways which I don't completely understand, yet). That creates a situation where companies that "lease" tend to try to be competitive with the already subsidized market. It sometimes turns out to be slightly more expensive, but the hassle-free nature of having "pros" maintain your installation and ask very few questions tends to be something people are interested in.
As an anecdote: a friend was doing some building work in his house and managed to damage a panel. They were replaced at no charge in less than a week. I was surprised because it was clearly his fault, but I guess they also want to keep their customers happy. Almost made me consider going with them if I bought my home.
Added bonus: if you use them with a CCGX and are comfortable with MQQT and/or Python there is literally nothing you can't control, automate or visualise with them. The CCGX itself is arm + linux and mostly open sourced https://www.victronenergy.com/live/open_source:start
The downsides are: 1) price but imho you get what you pay for many times over. 2) veconfigure for the multiplus itself is windows only, but runs fine in Wine on Linux and Mac
We bought our solar panels from Solar Edge.It's a 4.5-5 KW system
We are in our forth year. I've done nothing to it, no maintenance. It just works. Every now and then it rains and that cleans up the panels enough.I don't remember the details, but whenever a solar company reaches out to me they list all the maintenance they will perform on the panels (a not insignificant list), and that they will charge for it if I buy it instead of lease. And that's where I tell them they just convinced me not to get solar.
Where I live, every few years I get roof damage due to weather. These would be covered with a lease, but not with a purchase.
Then there are things they don't cover at all. My roof will need to be replaced in the next few years. They said that they'll remove all the panels and reinstall them for a fee (even with a lease). When asked for the amount of the fee, they usually give me a range ("it depends on each situation"). The problem is that fee wipes out quite a lot of the savings. My electricity bill is only about $60 at the moment. With their lease plans, I'll save perhaps only $10/month. A fee of a few hundred dollars wipes out years of savings.
I don't honestly know if maintenance will be a problem in reality. I just know that I can't trust them to let me know what kind of maintenance is involved.
That's because they want you to lease, not buy (and not just “lease in preference to buying”), because of their business model (and quite possibly sales agent incentives that exaggerate preferences in the actual business model.)
Sort of like how (well, before most of them went belly up because of internet competition), brick and mortar chain computer store sales staff would prefer driving off a sale to making one without an extended warranty.