On Clark Howard's show on CNN & HLN, he did a piece last week about installing a solar thermal system in his home in Atlanta for JUST heating his domestic water. He paid $12,000.00 for it. He got two cheap, Chinese flat-plate collectors. I did notice that the solar company installed the most expensive tanks, controls, etc. They had to have sold the equipment to him at more than double the wholesale price. Times are tough and business is poor but that kind of pricing is criminal!
For $12,000, Mirasol Solar could have heated his domestic water AND HIS HOUSE in the winter AND HIS SWIMMING POOL in the summer. I was one of several people who wrote to Clark to tell him that he should have paid less than $5,000 for his system.
Clark calculated that his payback would take nine years. He thought that was a good deal, especially since savings and investments are paying so little. We would have had his ROI down to less than five years!
I hope that people will take this as a cautionary tale. We run into a lot of people who think they know all about solar and tell us how they think it should be designed. They've read an article or two online and they are sure solar thermal is easy to do. Maybe if they can just weasel out some information from us on the specific parts they need, they can do it themselves? (It's like going to the doctor, giving him your diagnosis and your instructions on how to treat your condition with OTC drugs and then wondering why you don't get better.) Those are the people who are most likely to get scammed in the end. I wonder if Clark wasn't one of those people.
See the story about Clark's solar system at:
http://clarkhoward.com/liveweb/shownotes/2010/06/24/18697/
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