I was all hyped up on becoming a solar installer. There's a great school here in the PNW that trains most(?) solar installers in the area. (It's on Camano Island, IIRC?)

Anyway, then I got bursitis in my knee and had to get that taken care of, and it pretty much eliminated me climbing around on roofs... and so I started my own marketing consultancy, and ... 10 years later I noticed I wasn't in the solar industry any more.

I think the residential solar market is at the "rich toys" stage right now. There's a couple of factors you need to think about:

1. You have to either sell the excess power you are generating back to your local utility, or else you need a way to store it.

2. Utilities are WAY more stingy with what they will buy from the consumer, and while you might reduce your electric bill to nothing, you aren't gonna get paid from them anymore.

3. The only real way to store electricity effectively is the Tesla Power Wall. And to run your house for any extended period of time, you are going to need several of these in series. (Last I checked. But that fucker Musk iterates and improves at a blinding rate, so the thing might run your entire block for a week and distribute free cappuccinos now, for all I know.)

4. No matter how you work the math, you're gonna have a 15 year return on investment. So add up the next 15 years of your electrical bills, and that's the number you have to pay TODAY to eliminate your electric bills for about 3x longer than the average American stays in their home... So, in 5,475 days, you will finally have "free" power. And your system will be about 5 years out of date and inefficient at that point.

Now let's get back to Mr. Musk.

Who has designed, built, and installed solar roof tiles. Individual tiles that look like shingles, and replaces your ENTIRE roof with power generating glass tiles.

Now you not only get solar, you also get a new roof!

Three years ago, my wife and I tried to do this when we replaced our roof, but it wasn't ready in the PNW.

In the end, home solar doesn't really make sense for most homes in most locations. We put a traditional roof on our house, and switch from oil heat to a heat pump system (that is AMAZING!), and keeping the house at a balmy 72 degrees year round (with both heating and cooling) has cut our electrical bill by about 75% over the ELECTRICAL expense of running our OIL furnace! It's mind-blowing.

And in the PNW, the majority of our power is hydro-electric, so we can feel good about switching to electric from oil, whereas in other areas, you'd be getting power from coal-fired plants.

If you are in Seattle, Seattle City Light has an extensive solar incentive program: https://energysolutions.seattle.gov/renewable-energy/customer-solar/solar-energy-faqs/

That's a great place to start.