Publish Date: May 5th, 2025
Allison & Steve started considering solar + battery storage when their home needed some updates. Now, their house is the only one on the block that has power during an outage. With robust City of Denver rebates, solar + battery was a smart financial decision, too. See what else they have to share below.
What inspired you to start thinking about solar?
It backs up to some problems that we were having in our house. We live in an old house that was built in 1900, and we’ve always had problems with keeping the upstairs cool. The ducting is very old. It doesn’t lend well to air conditioning, so we brought in an HVAC guy to see if we could do anything with the ductwork. He took one look at it and told us we need a mini split. They installed a mini split, and it worked well. Plus, the insane amount of incentives that the city and County of Denver were throwing at us, as well as Xcel, brought the cost down a lot. Denver is very aggressive about this as far as incentives go. So, we considered that if we did a mini-split, maybe we should do a whole house heat pump. And if we’re going to do more electric, maybe we should be thinking about solar.
What made you choose Namaste Solar?
We engaged three different vendors, you and two other companies. What made us choose you was a couple of things. One was that Tristan, our sales advisor, was insanely generous with his time and his perspective. He spent hours with us going over details of things.
The other is that we had been quoted and told things by the other vendors that didn’t quite square with us. For example, they were talking about putting panels on our garage, which you had also quoted, and then passing it overhead as DC. You said that couldn’t be done, and they said it could.
We actually reached out to the city and county, and they confirmed that it couldn’t be done. And they spoke highly of your long-standing reputation and presence. They didn’t even mention either of the other contractors we reached out to. There was certainly an assertion of confidence in your work from the city, and that was really helpful.
At the end of it, it was the care you took. From initial contact all the way through post-sale, we didn’t feel that you ditched us after the installation to move onto the next customer. It felt like, for the money spent, it was an excellent value.
So, all of that plus the pricing after all the incentives made it so it would be kind of stupid if we didn’t do it.
When did your battery enter the conversation?
The battery had been quoted by the other two vendors, so we asked Tristan to quote it as well. And then we started talking about it a little bit more as a way to hedge against energy insecurity in the region. We’ve had two power outages here since the beginning of the year, and our neighbors have been quick to note that we’re the only ones on the block who have power. So that’s definitely working. And it was also as a hedge against the increasing cost of electricity.
How has solar + battery positively impacted your lifestyle?
Well, we have power when our neighbors don’t. That positively impacts our lifestyle. We’re not the loudest, most flag-waving ecowarriors, but we do appreciate the fact that we’re taking some load off the grid. We feel like we’re contributing to increased stability of the grid both by not drawing on it when it’s needed the most and by giving back to it when it’s potentially needed more. And also just a certain degree of self-sufficiency.
Our original concern about top-level heat has subsided and we’re running our A/C compressor less than half the time we were the previous summer. And because of the panels, there’s a substantial amount of solar energy that isn’t making it into the attic.
With the battery, We’re able to do energy arbitrage with it and sell energy back when it’s most expensive. This maximizes my credit and buys myself more winter months when we won’t have electric bills. So, it’s really helping to spread our self-sufficiency more broadly across the year.
What was your experience like working with us?
Wonderful. We appreciated everyone who worked with us. Very professional, very friendly. Generous with their time and my questions. Especially since my house presented certain engineering challenges. We worked back and forth to come up with potentially creative ways to solve certain wiring problems and they took it all in stride.
The whole process was really quick. From the day we signed with you to when permission-to-operate was granted was three months. Our installation was three days.
It’s very apparent that you’re available on the backend, too. One of your field techs actually reached out yesterday for a two-month check-in just to see how things were going.
How has solar financially impacted you?
We turned on our system in November, so it was hard to start banking energy. If you start in March, you’re probably a little bit ahead of the game. March was our first month we were able to put something in that energy bank and it looks like April will be that way as well.
And it’s important to note how aggressive Denver is with their rebates. We got a lot of money through rebates to finance this. And we likely wouldn’t have done this if the City of Denver’s rebates weren’t as aggressive.
You mentioned technical and engineering challenges. Do you want to speak to those?
Sure. We wanted to build out as much solar as we could. On our south facing roof, one of the pitches is unsafe for solar due to structural and safety reasons. So, all three vendors quoted the south pitch of our detached garage. And that’s when the differences between you and the other vendors started to come out.
You told me that to have solar on the detached garage we would have to either dig a trench between the garage and the home, cutting through irrigation zones and going under a concrete walkway to get there, or we could do AC overhead. But then we’d have to do a lot of technical stuff to convert it to DC and it would run up the cost. Other vendors said that we could run DC current overhead.
We ultimately decided to do something that you wouldn’t ordinarily recommend and put 6 panels on the north pitch of our roof, knowing that in the winter they’d be useless and in the summer we’d get decent production. We did it to maximize spring and summer production and to help push credit out as much over the year as we can.
And to be clear, Tristan never offered this solution. we asked for it. There was never any pressure to bulk up this order by throwing some panels on there.
If you were recommending someone explore the benefits of solar in three sentences, what would you say?
Do it. Do it. Do it. It can be a great benefit for your home.
