Not going to lie: It’s pretty expensive, and I wouldn’t recommend buying them if you need to get a loan to do so. The loan costs would eat into your solar savings. Other tips:
Do not buy a solar panel set up without batteries! The electric company does not want to be your battery, and will usually charge more for using their electricity than what you would get sending excess electrons back to them. Batteries add to the cost, but you save money in the end.
Beware of loan scams and shady solar panel dealers! Do your research! There’s a lot of direct sales people roaming around because the market is new, it’s extremely hot, and potential customers don’t know what they are getting into. Politely tell them to fuck off and go find a company that works for you.
Read reviews and ask for quotes from multiple installers. Do the math on your electricity usage, how much you’ll save, when you’ll break even, etc. There’s a lot of variables floating around, but there’s good resources out there, like Project Sunroof, to help you get good yearly estimates.
Get your installer to set up a circuit breaker home energy monitor. It’s cheap (compared to the main install) and you get a bunch of cool metrics around where you are using electricity. It pays to know where you are using electricity and whether it’s during the day or night.
Make sure you get the technical plans and have a decent idea how the whole system works. Remember, the installer is there to help you, and you should have good visibility into whether the system is working or not.
But, out of that hassle, you get the piece of mind that you’re (mostly) using renewable energy, saving on electricity bills in the long term, and have a natural whole-house UPS to keep things running during outages. I really hope we get to a spot where installing solar panels is a requirement to building a house, like HVAC or water pipes.