RevoluSun

As the sun beats down on her St. Louis Heights home, Susan Chandler walks to her laundry room in the morning and taps on a DC-AC inverter to check how much carbon dioxide she has kept out of the atmosphere. Her daily average: 14.2 pounds.

Then she walks to the meter box on the side of her house and watches the black line rotate backward.

"I love to see the meter spinning backwards, which means I'm reducing my electricity," she says. "Rather than going to HECO, it's saving the world."

Chandler had earlier installed solar water heating and CFL light bulbs in her five-bedroom residence, but decided to make a bigger leap toward the "green" movement by adding six photovoltaic panels from RevoluSun to reduce her dependence on the grid.

"I'm making my own electricity," said Chandler. "For me, it's pretty exciting."

A professor at the University of Hawaii Public Policy Center, Chandler opened her house to the community yesterday to showcase RevoluSun's solar module, which generated 86 kilowatt hours of power and offset 142 pounds of atmospheric carbon dioxide in just 10 days.

Chandler expects her electricity bill to be around $25 with the addition of the solar panels, compared to the $125 bill she's paid in the past.

RevoluSun, a new company, hopes to educate the community and expand awareness of affordable solar systems to help Hawaii become more sustainable and lower electric bills.

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[10/27/12] From Consumer Lines October 2012

Because of the many considerations involved with purchasing one of these systems, we developed “Going Solar,” a helpful online resource accessible at: http://goingsolar.heco.com.

Solar water heaters can last 15 years or longer, and PV systems can last 30 years or more.

While these systems will pay for themselves over time with the savings on your monthly electric bills, they do require a financial investment.

An important consideration is connecting your PV system to the grid. Most residential customers select our
Net Energy Metering program, which provides full retail credit for excess electricity sent to the grid. Other
options are the Feed-In Tariff and the Standard Interconnection Agreement. These programs are described
in detail on our website.