Generate Your Own Power.
Store It. Own It.

Residential solar panels convert sunlight into electricity that powers your home in real-time and feeds excess back to the grid for credit (net metering). A typical 7–10 kW system covers most of an average home's electricity needs. Panels are mounted on your roof or ground-mounted in your yard, connected through an inverter that converts DC power to usable AC. Modern panels are warrantied for 25 years with an expected lifespan of 30+.

A home battery stores excess solar energy (or off-peak grid power) and releases it when you need it — at night, during peak rate hours, or during power outages. The Tesla Powerwall 3 is the market leader: 13.5 kWh capacity, 11.5 kW continuous output, 97.5% efficiency, and a built-in solar inverter. Alternatives include the Enphase IQ 5P (modular, 15-year warranty) and Generac PWRcell 2 (best generator integration). One battery typically covers 8–12 hours of essential loads during an outage.

System size sets the base, and size comes off twelve months of your actual bills — not a rule of thumb per square foot. From there the roof drives it: pitch, orientation, how many separate roof planes the array has to be split across, shading from trees you are not going to cut down, and whether the decking and shingles have enough life left to carry a 25-year array. Putting panels on a roof with five years in it means paying to pull them and reset them later, so roof age is a scheduling decision as much as a cost one. On the electrical side: distance from the array to the panel, and whether your main panel can take the backfeed breaker or needs a line-side tap. Adding a battery brings its own inverter, transfer gear, and a decision about which circuits stay live in an outage. Payback across the three states we work in generally lands in the 7–10 year range against a 25-year panel warranty — the years after payback are the return. Schedule is mostly paperwork: permits, HOA approval where it applies, and the utility interconnection application, then the meter swap and Permission to Operate. Interconnection rules belong to your utility, not to us, and Duke, Dominion, the co-ops, and Georgia Power each run their own process and their own queue. The utility side routinely takes longer than the installation does.

This corner of the Southeast gets the sun for it — 210-plus clear days a year is typical across South Carolina, western North Carolina, and northeast Georgia. What differs is the program on the other end of the meter. In South Carolina, Duke Energy and Dominion run the net-metering and successor tariffs; North Carolina and Georgia set their own terms, and what you get credited for an exported kilowatt-hour is not the same number in each. We tell you which program your address actually falls under before we size anything, because that credit rate is what the payback math runs on. Strong sun, reasonable rates, and the incentives still on the table make solar-plus-storage one of the better long-term plays here — and the battery carries you through storm season on top of the savings.