Keith's 14.18 kW solar installation in Hamilton, Ontario

0:00 I'm Keith uh I I live in Hamilton uh I'm a computer engineer um

0:08 with a wife and two kids we've uh we have our own hosts uh we've been here for a couple of years and uh yeah that's

0:18 that's me so for me it's mostly about uh the environment and trying to do my part so

0:27 we have the means to be able to afford to invest in an upfront cost uh in order to offset our carbon footprint and

0:35 that's something that's important to both me and my wife so that's our our main driver we are using the interest

0:42 free loan um we haven't received the funds yet but we have applied and we've been accepted um so yeah we will receive

0:50 up to $40,000 uh as an interest free loan uh to to help offset the cost of the solar panels it's it has an upfront cost

0:58 associated with it and by having the the government step in and help with the uh

1:05 The Loan program to to make it a recurring cost that is you know smaller it's it's a lot easier for people to to

1:13 get in because our system included uh not only the solar but also a heat pump um that did extend out the time a little

1:22 bit but it had a larger ecological Advantage so we went with that I think it's around 7 years around 7 years we get paid back for the for the invest

1:30 um what caused me to pull the trigger was mostly my age so I recently had a milestone birthday and I wanted to have

1:38 the solar panels up on the roof before I hit that that date so so Zar I found through a Google

1:47 Search and then Google reviews were I guess a big motivating factor for for my decision- making um along with the

1:55 testimonials and and and that sort of thing say one other thing that um I really like liked about Zer was that you

2:02 had um example projects including costs available on the website so I thought that was very transparent most companies

2:10 won't give you any sort of indication of how much things were going to cost until you got a a proper quote so I really

2:17 like that I like that you were a turnkey company that's important to me um I'm highly specialized and so don't have a

2:24 lot of uh I guess general knowledge and so for me it's important important that I hire a company that's able to handle

2:33 everything associated with a project that uh that I don't need to understand the details myself we weren't doing just

2:40 solar we were doing solar uh plus of the heat pump right Plus in addition to that it turns out that our electrical system

2:47 wasn't large enough to handle the solar install that we were going to do so we had to also do an electrical upgrade so all of those things were things that Zer

2:55 were able to um first of all Supply most companies won't do to both a heat pump and the solar right uh but also identify

3:04 and um explain up front so that we knew what we were getting into yeah no we're we're very happy so far with how

3:12 everything is going it's only been a month but uh everything is working well the heat pump's been longer the heat pump's been here for about 4 months um

3:20 and uh yeah our gas usage has plummeted to uh I would say less than 10% of what we were using last year this is the the

3:30 app that came with the solar panels um this is done by a company called solar Edge and as you just saw we're we're

3:38 able to monitor live exactly how much power we're generating so right now we're generating 9.45

3:46 KW Additionally you can set it up for how much have I produced this week right so you got a a nice histogram there showing you how much you produc this

3:54 week and on a monthly basis and yearly for the solar install it was very smooth the guys were uh were done in in a day

4:04 like took less than a day both financially and environmentally it's it's a great uh investment because now

4:12 we're going to be generating clean power for the next as you said 30 to 40 years um and and we're also insulated from

4:21 changes that could take place for example increases in in power so they're expecting that the price of power is going to go up over the course of time

4:30 as we've already seen it do and we've locked in our price we've paid Upfront for the power for the next 30 to 40

4:38 years I was very happy working with Zer so I had a lot of questions throughout the process and the answer the the

4:47 company was always very responsive and detailed and uh when project problems came up the right people got involved to

4:55 to help we would recommend that others do as well