Drive through many of Ann Arbor’s neighborhoods and you will see a fair number of houses where the owners have installed rooftop solar panels — at their own expense.
Jerry Davis is one of the more recent of these homeowners. He lives in an attractive stucco house in Ann Arbor’s Burns Park neighborhood.
Several of his neighbors installed rooftop solar panels some time ago. But for his house? Well, a lot of other things had to come first.
“This house was built in 1919,” he explained. “It wasn’t insulated, the roof was a mess, the windows were leaky.”
But over the years, the price of solar panels came down. The federal government now offers a tax credit of thousands of dollars for rooftop solar, more if you also install home battery storage. And the city of Ann Arbor struck a group discount deal with companies that install solar panels. For Davis, it was time.
He showed me his brand new panels…
