Those with solar panels

I had someone come today and give us an estimate for solar electric and a hot water heater. I'm very excited about it but I have some questions for those that have them:

How did you pay for them? Home equity? I know LIPA offers rebates but how did you do the rest?

Were you looking to cover 100% of your electric?

How are you heating your house?

Re: Those with solar panels

I only have it for water. They were here when we bought the house. I think they are about 20 years old. We like them our water gets REALLY hot 3 seasons out of the year and we have to put the anti scold on.

I really want to put the other ones on for electric but we need to redo the roof first and we have to get them to remove the solars to do the roof.

Re: Those with solar panels

We have electric panels on order. Should be installed in 2-3 months. We are paying it with the home equity loan we took out to pay for the addition we are adding (we have to wait until the addition is up first, so we have the rest of the roof to put the panels on... )

We're most likely not going to cover 100% of our electric needs most of the time, but we are covering as much of the south-facing roof as possible, so unless we got creative, we couldn't add any more panels anyway. I think having the panels will make us even more energy conscious, so we'll probably try to conserve even more, to try and get close to 100%. There will definitely be many days where the meter is running backwards. That will be fun to watch..

We have gas for heat.