alt Hacker NewsHaving done 2 solar installs, one over 10 years and one 6 years, both going strong. Nothing else needed, it just sits there and produces.
So, from my experience, that's not the case. Maybe the people you know keep tweaking because they're enthusiasts like you have with cars.
It could be as simple as a different model. In one of those it was easy to make it feasible if you had no cap on how much to sell back, but it was limited to consumption plus like 10% or something like that. Since the property used very little energy but had a big roof we thought itd be a good thing to produce green energy while making a little money or even just breaking even, but to break even we'd have to use way more energy which was completely against the original objective. So its not like the technology isn't able to do it but the rules can make it very hard and a few years less of operation for some components make the math very difficult if you're conservative and want to ensure break even within some reasonable timeline