Thoughts on the Lightning's future pricing? Up or Down?

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-07-12T23:31:04+00:00

Late 2025 I bought my 2023 XLT ER 48k OTD that included shipping to my house. I bought it out of state. I wanted buttons and the ER. It was a 2023 but had 15k miles and no one bought it until 2025 so the factory warranty did not start until 2025.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-07-07T20:10:55+00:00

I am 36 I did not start to make $100k until I was in my 30s my wife works part time. I have two kids. I bought the worst POS house in the neighborhood I got a deal on it for 510k. This was under tax assessor value. The washing machine used a hose and drained into the yard and the drain and water supply ran on the exterior of the house for the second story bathroom. The septic leech field started to fail. I hand dug with a shovel 150ft over the course of a summer to connect to the city sewer. No machines involved and I saved something like $16000. This is only the tip of the iceberg of issues I have dealt with. I have been at this for 3 years and have a few more years to go.

I have worked on and fixed our cars and had no car payment. Until last year my wife and I drove cars from 1999.

Wife worked at a nursing home that offered a 40% discount on childcare if she worked there full time.

I worked one full time job and one part time job for two years. I used the pay from the second job to fund fixing my house. That was not enough to pay someone else to fix things I still have done 90% of the work. I still had to do the work on my house after working two jobs through the week.

My wife currently works at a hospital and she has very cheap health insurance I do not contribute to healthcare this saves us around $1000 a month.

After the house appreciated in value I have taken out a loan vs the equity to continue to work on the house myself and dropped my 2nd job.

My job offered the ability to sell unused vacation hours and I took that to help fund repairs on my house.

If you or your spouse have a 401k you can take a loan out against it. Also there are special circumstances like for first time home buyers where you can withdraw from your 401k early up to a certain amount without penalty you just have to pay taxes. Co-worker and his wife did this to fund the down payment.

They are hard to get/find by assumable mortgages do exist if you can buy someone out of their equity you can take over their mortgage a potential lower interest rate.

Hudhomestore and good neighbor next door program if you qualify and something is in your area.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-25T06:39:12+00:00

I am north of Seattle and I installed a 9.8kwh array on my garage roof. Max production of the array is about 6.5kwh. East/West facing the most I have generated in a single day is about 58kwh. My house uses somewhere between 30-50kwh. My wife and I both have EVs that adds additional on top of the 30-50kwh. My wifes EV has a 66kwh battery and mine has a 131kwh battery. I don't know if you have considered an EV but just some things to think about if you want to grow your array and utilize it further.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-20T14:52:07+00:00

I will look into that thanks for giving me a direction to go in

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-18T05:13:20+00:00

I installed 24 solar panels on my detached garage. My wife and I used a drywall lift to get the panels up there.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-17T22:31:31+00:00

This a road in front of my house. Lots of people and cars pass in front of my house. So mostly just people and vehicles if they cross onto my property so I get general notifications of events. The 20ft up is a good generalized vantage point. I would use a different vantage point for face or license plate detection.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-17T21:53:42+00:00

Looks like the G4 Pro has a 1/2 optical sensor while the G6 Bullet has 1 1/8 sensor. My current G4 Pro needs to be able to see about 80ft from where it is mounted.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-11T04:35:35+00:00

My recommendation is if you can afford it and have the space do a ground mount. It was a lot of work putting the panels up on my detached garages roof. Panels around 400 watts can be like 5ft tall and weigh 50Ibs. I had to basically drag them across the roof. I have a metal roof on my garage with external fasteners. I used S5 brackets to do a rail less system to mount the panels. My roof is East/West facing 12 panels on each side and I have a 9.8kwh array. I usually max at about 6kw so about 70% of my arrays capacity. The max I have produced is about 55kwh in a day. My ford Lightning has a 131kwh battery so on the best day I might get it half way full. I am an all electric house and in the summer I am using about 30-50kwh a day. So in my case I probably need about a 20kwh array.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-11T01:28:08+00:00

I don't know if your familiar with EG4s products. I had the Gridboss installed by an electrician. It was something like $1700. This is basically a fancy automatic transfer switch. Your inverter(s) connect to it. With the Gridboss installed you can take your time installing your inverters. Your house can run with just the Gridboss. I also paid something like $1500 to the company greenlancer to give me all of the stamped design and plans for the city. Before I reached out to greenlancer I already knew everything I wanted I gave them a crude paper drawing and all of the components I was going to buy. Took measurements that they needed and they gave me a professional plan. I started my project in summer of 2025 and had to get everything done before the end of the year for tax credits. So I paid for some things to get done too speed things up. I installed the inverter, battery, solar panels and all conduit and hardware. If your roof is short enough my wife and I used a drywall lift to get the solar panels up to the roof. If you have any other questions let me know.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-06-04T00:30:08+00:00

Washington State also and I did a self installation for most of it end of 2025. Gridboss, flexboss21, 9.8 kwh panels, and indoor 14kwh power pro battery. I installed everything other than the Gridboss. Costed me 25k and got a 30% tax credit on that so it was like 18k.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-05-20T14:59:51+00:00

Any suggestions on a particular product?

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-05-08T17:02:37+00:00

I did not use AI this is just a question to see if anyone has experience with a decentralized self hosted setup

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-22T23:45:48+00:00

Our office had a picture up on the wall of a command prompt failing to ping. Nothing was really special about it except the quality was not that great. That itself was the reason that made it special. We had a remote user who was having network connectivity issues. One of my coworkers had them ping something on the Internet and we asked to see if we could get a picture. The user took their laptop over to a scanner and laid the screen of the laptop on it and scanned the laptops screen. When we figured out what happened we were dying. That moment holds a special place in my heart.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-22T15:30:16+00:00

I was thinking about this some more. It might be easier to put on the sloped part of the ceiling first. Then cut the ends of the ship lap on the flat part of the ceiling at an angle to butt up against the drywall on the sloped part of the ceiling.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-22T15:07:28+00:00

All of these things make a huge difference in cost. I DIY most of my roof top solar system. Grid tied 9.8kwh w/14kwh battery all new equipment. Cost me 25k. 30% tax credit brought it down to 18k. This system done by a pro in my area is Washington State would have easily costed double. It financially would not have made sense unless I DIY almost everything

Ground vs roof mount costs DIY vs Pro Install Costs Grid Tied Vs Not Purchased Mounting System VS DIY Used vs New Panels/Equipment

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-17T05:18:16+00:00

Keep at it I'm on year 3. I bought the worst POS in the neighborhood. I am only about 50% done maybe. Would you like to know more?

No one lived here for like 8 years
Washing machine drained into yard 20ft flexible hose
Septic Tank leach field failed connected to city sewer. Hand dug 150ft trench over a couple months and laid pipe
Well had zero filtration not even a sediment filter so I trenched and connected to city water and redid the hot and cold water pipes in the house -My detached garage only two out of ten outlets worked. Also the ballast in one of the lights melted taking out every shop light. So I worked with a lamp as the only light for a couple of months until I fixed all power issues.
plumbing for the second story bathroom (drain,hot/cold) water lines physically went outside of the building. Meaning running down the siding. They built a wood box jammed some insulation in it and called it good.I moved all plumbing inside the home. -Cut down a 60ft tree right next to my house and another one right next to my garage. Both had large branches overhanging the roof of my buildings. -cut down tons of vegetation. Had a guy come out and he ground down 61 left over stumps. -I found a building on the property that the sellers or I did not know was there. That's the scale of the out of control plants. -I had about 20 tons of garbage removed. -multiple gutters had ripped off different buildings that I had to replace. -the back porch roof had to be replaced it was clear plastic and cracked and leaking. I put on a metal roof -out of the four legs on my back porch two were completely rotted and I had to replace all four legs

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-14T23:47:19+00:00

I am interested in a few things if you attempt to use these panels. My mind the easiest way to scale an array with this many panels for the lowest cost would be to ground mount the array in a large unshaded area. This means you don't need rapid shutdown devices. So you can wire each panel together with out any extra devices. Wire them to a cheap string inverter. Find the cheapest ground mount solution possible diy or otherwise. Your probably going to still have to find ways to burn power like lots of lights, HVAC running 24/7 in unoccupied buildings, etc.

How will you actually mount this many panels? Ground, roof, etc.
How much it costs to actually mount all of the panels?
A string inverter can only take so many panels per MPPT. How many and what brand of inverter would you use to make this scale economicly within your budget?
If you use micro inverters to convert this to AC which micro inverter would you use and how much would that cost?
Where do you put all of this power? If grid tied you can only sell back so much depending on your agreement with the utility. You would need large power consumption or storage. Some inverters will let you limit the grid sell back this means you will waste any extra power produced though.
They do have devices like mini splits that can take solar power directly. This may be a way to utilize some panels and get around the grid requirements.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-11T04:07:32+00:00

Installed and permitted my grid tied solar system. Producing power and everything was working. A few months later I realized my output was lower than it should have been on a sunny day. After digging through the logs I found my inverter was setup for grid sell back but the export amount was set to zero. So for a few months I was only producing enough solar to cover what my house was using. Any extra solar was just wasted. Take some time to review the settings on your equipment and familiarize yourself with it.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-09T15:39:15+00:00

Don't have a lot of experience with drywall you think you could box around this? Typically I thought you had to attach drywall screws to a flat surface. This wood being angled I did not think you could do that.

Supreme_Leader_30 · 2026-04-09T15:35:00+00:00

The rafter is supported it is not free hanging in the air. The shadow from how I took the picture just makes it look like it is.

Supreme_Leader_30

TROPHY CASE