Lumina Solar

Bottom line up front! Lumina Solar is the BEST Solar company you could work with to fulfill your home solar installation! If you would like to know why please keep reading! The Lumina Solar company, from the President of the Company, Mike Kirby, to my sales representative, Zach Hare, to my technical advisor Erika are bar none the best group of people you could ask to work with in a project like this! Not to get to flowery but they earn your business and are willing to help answer or solve any of your solar questions concerns, needs and overall satisfaction! Lumina Solar files and submits all the forms or they help you fill out what you need to complete as the home owner. They run down any issues any getting the project off the ground with the county and getting everything set up. Lumina for my experience had the best installation team for the installation of my system. They provided top of the line products at a fair market value. Mike, Zach and Erika at various times during the install were instrumental in calming any concerns or issues I had with this process. They provided me as much information as I could handle and asked for and explained it in way that I could understand. I have some knowledge on electricity so they were able to get super detailed in areas where I was comfortable but, in the areas, I knew nothing they were able to explain or help me understand those things in the simplest of terms. To be upfront this review has been ten months in the making and I have had zero complaints with Lumina. I wanted to write something sooner but I didn’t want to write a review I would be making changes to over and over through the process. At the end I do have some recommendations for things I might do differently but they are again lessons learned for me. I am a first-time solar buyer for my home. If you are too, here is what I would have wanted to know before I started my project. PLEASE don’t take any of my advice until you do the math for yourself! For my system, I have a 12K solar panel system and there is only myself and my wife in the house. A lot of what I am describing will need to be applied to the size of the system you have/want installed on or at your home and the amount of power you consume. The quote process: I looked at five State of Maryland solar panel installer companies. One would only work with me over the phone. The other four came to my house and they were very friendly. Of those four the one I was disappointed the most was Tesla. Fast forward and history showed that as we know now Tesla was going through a rough patch with layoffs and going back to primarily to focusing on their cars. Of the remaining top two Lumina and MD State Solar both agents were named Zach >: ) Lumina beat out MD State Solar because they provided a much better panel and product plus listened to what I wanted and gave it to me. My Strategy: I was at the stage in my home I needed a new roof installed. I would not advise putting a solar system on your home until you are or can put new shingles and roofing materials over your home. I was doing both so I had installed a dark black roof to match the dark black panels. To me if you’re driving by my home and not paying attention you would hardly notice them. I wanted a system that would get me as close to zero Kilowatt hours (Kwh) used during my peak months of electric consumption and use of electricity. Versus a system that would average out to zero Kwh over the course of a year. Why this strategy? Because MD as of the date of my review and before, has written into law that the power company must pay you, the solar provider, annually for any over produced electricity. They must pay you for anything up to 2Mwh of electricity by your anniversary date of your system. As of the date of this review that is almost $1400.00 for over production (based on PEPCO’s published rate of .0007 cents per Kwh) for the year. Based on this law you become your own power company using and producing clean reusable power for the grid and getting paid for it. What I foresee this accomplishing is, if I zeroed out my consumption at my peak then the rest of the year when I wasn’t using as much power, I was going to over produce and at least help zero out the cost of my peak use and cover the distribution and line maintenance fee charged by PEPCO. Note: No matter how much you over produce you still must pay your power company for the line and distribution cost. Today it is about $16 a month, EVERYONE (user and provider) pays this. Also, I choose to buy. Leasing to me is really only for those folks that want to save the planet and can’t afford to buy the system. Leasing to me is getting a small discount in your electric bill and letting the company your leasing to get all of the carbon credits and money earned from the production of the solar you should be getting had you been able to buy. My opinion only. Taxes: The 30% Federal Tax credit certainty helped knock off at least $10K (for me) on the overall cost of my $35K system. 2019 is the last year you will be able to take advantage this tax credit at the 30% rate. After 2019 it drops 2% each year until it is gone totally. The State of Maryland offers home solar installers $1000.00 just for installing a system. Which if applied to the cost of the system reduces it further. The state also has a Alternative Energy Tax credit which is applied to your property tax. This property tax credit is 50% of the cost of the system and depending on what that is applied to your property tax will not cover a 100% of your property tax. It will alow that dollar amount to be spread across three years of property taxes. If the County you live in has not depleted this incentive already you might get this before others. When I applied my response back from PG county made me eligible to receive it but cannot be applied until July 2029 >: ) System: I wanted a panel that did not look like I had solar panels on my roof. The Panels I wanted were Solaria PowerXT®-350R-PD at the time of my selection they were best panel on the market. Out preforming any of the panels that any of the other solar companies were using. MD State Solar could not get these or didn’t want to, I could not tell, but Lumina could and I have not been disappointed in the slightest! PEPCO: I wish I could do a separate review of PEPCO. I will be fair and say this though they aggravated me at times but they were quicker than expected in getting my approval and system operational. Whatever your motivation for Solar is i.e. Save the planet. Save on your Electric bill. Save on your Electric and Stick it to the Man. Whatever that motivation is ultimately you want to see a dent in your electric bill. As expected, PEPCO would prefer to maintain their high profit margin and does not educate you or offer you certain options unless you ask for them. i.e true Net metering. If you don’t ask from the get go PEPCO will come out and swap your electric meter out with one of their “smart” meters. However, they will switch it out with one that will maintain your current billing schedule. For most it is the three-tiered Peak, Off Peak and Night use. So, what does that mean? If you have a Solar system and you over produce then you will still pay for electricity and (energy provider charge… i.e. natural gas) charges. To me that was crazy. Yet I could see if someone was leasing Solar this would help keep your cost low and wouldn’t matter to you since you would see no benefit from over production. However, if you own then you want what I call “True Net-Metering”. This means whatever you over produce gets credited to the next month and the next or if you have a bad month of solar production that credit gets applied to your consumption. For me with PEPCO it wasn’t until I was on my second billing cycle that I figured this out. It is and has been extremely difficult to get anyone from the PECO solar division to respond to questions or calls. However, with time it finally got figured out. Once installed you should feel much better about being able to properly monitor your production. For as long as the process took to get to this point. I have to say my Lumina Solar system is not disappointing me and was installed during the end of the year. Even with the short days and bad weather we have been having as of the date of this review I am sitting at over 650 Kwh over produced/credited to my account. I will try to updated my review when I get to my one-year anniversary date to let you know if my strategy paid off or if broke even. Either way if I had to do it all over again I would still use and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the Lumina Solar company team they are good people and true professionals!