Solar Energy Is the Beginning of a Sustainable Lifestyle

Eat more vegetables. Get lots of exercise. Go to bed early. There are plenty of things we know can improve our lives — but how often do we actually do them? The same is true when it comes to owning a home. Many know that solar panels not only can significantly cut back on energy bills, they’re good for the environment and can boost home values, too. Take a look down any street, though, and you’ll see that plenty of people haven’t yet taken the plunge.

What a lot of these homeowners might not realize is that the benefits of solar go way beyond energy usage. Generating electricity from your own roof can be an entry point to an entire new sustainably elevated lifestyle. And now, thanks to an innovative approach from solar-energy titan Sunrun, the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. By removing steep up-front costs, the 2025 Good Housekeeping Home Renovation Award winner makes solar more attainable for homeowners.

So if you’re among those who haven’t made the switch yet, here are just a few reasons you might want to.

Power Around the Clock

Sometimes the sun’s not shining, or your home’s total load is more than solar panels can meet. But that’s no reason to opt out of solar: There are two ways to make up the shortfall. The first is to draw power from the electrical grid, just as you always have. However, the more eco-friendly alternative is to pair your solar panels with a battery that stores excess energy when the sun is shining for use later. An extra advantage here: Should your area suffer an electrical blackout — an increasing reality for homeowners nationwide, given the uptick in extreme weather events — you’ll be able to draw what you need directly from the battery without a generator. In fact, since the battery kicks in seamlessly to avoid any interruption in power whatsoever, you may not even realize there’s an outage.

Gateway to the All-Electric Lifestyle

Generating electricity from roof solar panels can help you lead a more sustainable life in other ways, too, by facilitating the switch to an all-electric home for heating, hot water, and cooking. Heat pumps, for instance, use electricity to warm your home during the coldest months and cool it in the summer. Induction stoves provide faster heating and more consistent temperature control, and don’t produce any indoor air pollutants. And charging stations allow you to run your electric vehicles without ever having to visit a gas pump.

An Easy Entry Point

A major roadblock for many consumers is simply the cost: Installing solar panels on your roof costs about $30,000 on average, or about $22,000 with current government subsidies. But buying panels outright isn’t the only way in. Sunrun offers a “solar subscription option” in which they install panels and all the associated equipment — such as the mounting rack, inverter and electrical cables — at little to no up-front cost, then charge a monthly fee (much like a car-lease payment) under a contract that typically runs 15 to 25 years.

While buying the equipment outright generally results in a better value, since that monthly fee will rise gradually over time, the major benefit of the subscription model is that Sunrun will monitor, service, and repair the system during the duration of the contract, since it’s in Sunrun’s best interests that your system remain healthy and functional. If you own your own panels and something breaks, on the other hand, you’ll have to pay out of pocket yourself to have it replaced or repaired. Accordingly, the subscription model is increasingly popular: To date, nearly 85% of Sunrun’s more than 1 million customers have opted for the solar and storage subscription model to take advantage of its many benefits.

Set It and Forget It

One advantage of this approach is that Sunrun’s team chooses the panels and the ancillary equipment for you based on its expert knowledge, so you don’t have to invest time in doing the research from scratch yourself. The company also takes care of obtaining permits from local authorities and covers the cost of maintenance and repair for the duration of the contract. And while some homeowners worry that a solar contract could potentially make selling their house in the future more complicated, Sunrun points that 98% of home sales involving its leases go forward with them transferred successfully.

And once you’re running your whole house off your own internal grid, you’ll have full access to all your energy-usage data—making it super-easy to track so you can make better decisions about how and when you expend power. Which leads us to perhaps the most compelling argument for rooftop solar: While the decision to install it can take a moment, the benefits it generates will last a lifetime and beyond. So far, Sunrun solar installations have resulted in a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to removing 4.3 million gas-burning cars from the road for a year, while saving its customers approximately $1.3B in energy costs.

Visit Sunrun for your free personalized quote.

Jeff Wise is a journalist specializing in aviation, adventure, and psychology and was recently featured in the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.” He lives north of New York City and for fun flies gliders and single-engine airplanes.