The Night the Neighborhood Went Dark

When we started looking into Texas home solar after Hurricane Beryl, nobody warned us how unreliable CenterPoint’s local grid could be. It seemed to take little more than a hard storm or a badly placed tree limb to lose power for the day. Then Hurricane Beryl showed us just how serious that problem could become.

The storm itself spared our house. The power did not come back for five days.

My wife uses a CPAP machine while sleeping. She went almost a week without it. We were not just hot and uncomfortable without air conditioning. She was also without medical equipment she needed. I do not know about you, but nobody threatens the health of my family without me doing something about it.

I am an electrical designer by trade and have worked on utility-scale PV and BESS projects. I had the knowledge to do something, and after Beryl, I had the reason. So I applied my professional experience to my own home.

What I Found Out When I Started Looking

The first thing I learned about Texas home solar was that a grid-tied solar system is not a normal DIY project. You cannot legally mount some panels, connect them to the house, and start sending electricity onto the utility grid. The system needs approved plans, permits, inspections, compliant equipment, utility interconnection paperwork, and the proper licensed professionals signing off on the work.

That makes sense. An improperly connected system can backfeed a line that utility crews believe is dead. I understood the danger. It simply meant I needed an installer who could handle the paperwork and construction while still allowing me to participate in the technical design.

I found Good Faith Energy through a trusted friend in the industry. Before I could contact them, a solar salesman knocked on my door. He said everything I wanted to hear. He was well trained, and even for someone who works in this industry, his pitch was polished. But his quote came in at more than $70,000, and the numbers were not adding up.

I reached out to Good Faith and told them I knew nothing about their company except that a trusted friend in the industry trusted them. Within two weeks, they had surveyed my house, run the calculations, and sent me a proposal. My final signed contract was $44,395, substantially less than the door-to-door offer.

The proposals were intended to serve the same basic goal, but they were not identical line for line. I am not going to pretend that every dollar of the difference came from one fee or markup. What the comparison showed me was how dramatically the sales structure, financing, commissions, and final system design can change what a homeowner pays.

I told them what I did for a living and asked to work directly with their engineering team. They were happy to let me. After working through the usage and backup goals with their technical team, we ended up with a system approximately 1.5 times larger than the sales-style system initially suggested for our house. That was intentional. I was not designing around the smallest array that could shave a few dollars off the bill. I was designing around whole-house operation, battery charging, and extended grid outages.

The result is a 10.53 kW DC array with two Tesla Powerwall 3 units providing 27 kWh of nominal battery storage. While the sun is up, the system powers the house and charges the batteries. At night, we draw from the batteries. Most months, the energy portion of our electric bill is either very small or offset by credits.