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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

Very curious where this is? Sounds ridiculous, what jurisdiction wouldn’t include them as part of the house? Utterly bizarre!

Also why couldn’t they afford them? Is this the US where the equivalent of a $5000 system elsewhere in the world seems to cost $25K to install for some reason? Even then, with depreciation as long as it’s a couple of years old surely the residual value isn’t that much…?

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In the UK it's quite a common setup that you don't buy the panels outright, you sign a contract with a 3rd party company that installs the panels on your house and maintains them, but they own the panels, you can just use whatever electricity they produce and any surplus goes to the company owning the panels. The problem is that a lot of these companies went bust when the government ended the electricity export subsidy, and in most cases these panels were then transferred to a larger provider that honours the original contract but on the sale of the house they won't transfer it to the new owner - the only option is for the new owner to buy them outright. And because they rarely look at them in terms of current market value, they will quote you whatever the panels were brand new - which yes, absolutely can be in the £15-20k range, which is crazy by any measure, and you end up in this stupid situation. Usually the best option is actually to remove them instead, but as per contract - you are liable for the cost of doing so, which ends up costing few grand anyway, once you factor in scaffolding and labour and recycling and everything else. And so it's now a burden when it comes to selling the house.

The owners of the house may not own the solar panels: there's a psuedo-scam running around where they are installed for "free" by a company that then gets a lien on the house https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/solar-scams/

This is probably exactly what happened. Those bad boys are not cheap to install either. Systems running well into the 30-50k levels to be paid over '20 years'. The system I put in would have cost about 45k after 20 years if I had taken their loan. I can buy all the electricity I need and 3 of my neighbors for that. As I had the money for up front it ended up costing me 16. Even then the 'ROI' is rubbish. Still cool to get a bill that is just interconnect fees though.

Iowa. I don't know the details, but I assume the solar panels were leased. My friends don't make a lot of money, so they're pretty limited in what they can afford up front. IIRC, the panels would have added around $10K.

There were many dodgy schemes in the UK years ago ("free solar panels! cheap electricity!") where people didn't realise there was a mortgage on the panels for 30 years+ which was now in the deeds of the house and made mortgage companies back out, suspect it's exactly this.

If they were under some kind of borderline-scam scheme like that, yes that would make sense. But that’s very different than just “having solar panels” that the OP said!

Op just said "but it had solar panels" - which.....it does. And because it's such a common setup in the UK, every time you see a house with solar panels you can be almost certain it's done this way, not owned outright by the owner.

It could well be that the homeowner has them under some contract (so they may not be part of the house in that sense).

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