I know - the title is really harsh on this article but it really ticks me off when people claim things that just cannot be true.

Just now I read a comment on my article about how I recycled some old solar panels. Joseph Remily left a comment that was really flattering (probably so I'd leave it up), but he also made sure to include a link to his web site about solar panels and wind power and Green Powered Homes.

I followed the link to Joseph's page and I was amazed at what I was reading - people saving money by using solar electricity!

Mainly I was taken aback by the customer testimonials - let's take the one on GreeenPoweredHome.net that was supposedly written by Jason Dawson of Georgia, USA.

In Jason's testimonial he says that he is saving $30 on his electricity bill EVERY MONTH! That is awesome Jason but are you sure you know how to read your electrical bill?

If we go over to the Department of Energy's web site we are presented with a table of electricity costs in the different areas of the USA. Georgia is down the list under South Atlantic and the average rates for 2009 and 2010 were 10.13 and 10.15 cents respectively.

So let's take that $30 Jason saved and see just how much electricity we can buy with it at Georgia's electrical rates.

Since Jason expresses his savings in dollars we're going to have to convert Georgia's 2010 rate to dollars (instead of cents) as well and that's pretty easy to do by just moving the decimal to the left by two digits. We end up with $0.1015 as the electrical rate in dollars.

Now to find out how many kilowatt hours Jason could have bought with his $30 we just divide $30 by the rate he pays for electricity ($0.1015) and we end up with a whopping 295.56 kilowatt hours worth of electricity.

Wow! Jason - I hope you have more than the little 50 watt panel that's shown in your picture because PVWatts says you're going to need close to a 3kW system to put out that amount of electricity in a month!

Don't forget to work out the numbers people!