[biker1]

Thanks for your post. It appears that it continues to be hard to make a case for PV panels since the prices are continuing to drop. Also, we used 9700 kWhs last year and the payback period is likely out past 10 years. We may not be in the house 10 years from now and may not be able to recover the cost if the prices of panels continues to drop.

Originally Posted by villagetinker

Back up North, I was involved with all aspects of customer generation, and specifically Solar PV systems, for over 30 years. I am still on the national standards committees with IEEE and UL on these systems. Now for the bad news, Florida is a bad location to install these, if you want to at least break even. The "sunshine" state has no programs to support customer owned Solar systems. California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey just to name a few have all figured out how this works. All of these states have deregulated the utility industry and established programs for customer owned generation.

As I understand it from the SECO webpage (I am a SECO customer), the best you can do is new metering. If your system generates 10kW, but you use only 8 kW you get a credit of 2 kW for the next day. I do not recall the details if you have a net credit at the end of a month or year, but I did not recall a payment for the excess electricity.

So bottom line is this, take your yearly electric bill, it will also have the amount of power used. Have your installer estimate the size of the system and cost, then look at how much you will save based on the proposed size.
In general, costs of these systems have been coming down, but I doubt that you will break even unless there is some from of subsidy. I believe the Federal subsidy ran out the end of 2014, and I do not think Florida ever had one.

Please do some additional research, and I will be glad to further discuss with you, just drop me a PM.