CALLED ON THE SOLAR CITY GUYS to come give me an estimate on switching over. I was impressed with my options. It made me glad I finally broke down and got the free information. Why was I hesitating?

I’ve been playing cat and mouse with the Solar City sales reps at Home Depot for six months. I’d always stop briefly at their booth and tell them how supportive I was, how I owned 50 shares, and wished them luck. When they pressed me for an estimate, I’d repeat my old, tired, delay story. “Yeah, we’re not ready. We don’t know how long we’ll live in this house. We’re retiring. We may move away. You never know.” The sales pitch always stops there. They do a soft sell, which I appreciate.

Last week shopping for deck boards, I stopped again at the Solar City booth. The rep was knowledgeable and had an awesome handshake. During our conversation, a proverb was bouncing in my head, “You can never know too much,” and suddenly I found myself agreeing to a visitation.

Scott showed up with a laptop and a colorful, easy-to-understand prospectus. He already had satellite images of my house with solar panels overlaid. That was my first paradigm shift. I imagined a solar house being covered completely in panels. Scott’s image showed only two small strips, both on sides unseen from the curb.

“Hmm,” I said about the small footprint. “That changes my impression. They look like they can be installed and uninstalled quickly.”

“Yep,” said Scott. “They go up quick and easy.”

He projected to save me about $40 per month, or $512 a year on my electric bill all told. That’s with the leased system. The lease runs 20 years, and then you can extend it 10 more years, or have them remove the panels. I can’t lease to own.

That lease option would save me about $10,000 over 20 years.

If I purchased the system customized for my house, it would cost me $22,900, payable in installments. Once owned, I’d save an additional, approximate $100 a month, zeroing out my electric bill that averaged $137 a month in 2014.

That buy option would save me $32,880 over 20 years; minus the purchase price and some rounding off, that comes to about $10,000, same as the lease. It’s a dead heat. However, when I buy, I get the federal tax credit of $6,885. I would also get any local tax breaks. That tips the scales toward buying my solar.

Still undecided, I posted on my Facebook account that I had a Solar City rep give me an estimate, and I was overwhelmed with the number of comments I got from Benicians who said as a group: Yes, yes, yes, indeed. I got solar, I love it, I’m saving money, I’m happy, it was the right decision for us, my electric bill for the year was four bucks, and so on.

It was another paradigm shift to learn how many friends of mine have gone solar already.

I did all this research independent of Susan. It was time to call her in. It was like introducing Sargent Wu to the existence of Wesen. Her first response was Grimm.

“Solar? Really? Here? No, no, no. We don’t know how long we’re going to live in this house. We’re retiring. We may move away. You never know.”

“Come on, baby. We’ve been telling ourselves that for thirty years. At least listen to what the guy had to say. Any way we do it, we save money, at least five hundred bucks a year.”

She agreed to listen and we flipped through the pages of charts and estimated savings projections. The data swayed her. Now she’s curious and interested.

“But,” she said, and she darted her finger in the air like it could pop a balloon, “first we need a new roof.”

Ah. Checkmate. She had me on that caveat. We do need a new roof. There’s no denying it. We cannot install solar on our old shingles.

I said to Susan, “The ten grand we will save over the next twenty years will pay for a new roof.”

“So, we go through this whole solar conversion, deal with it for the rest of our lives, and all we get out of it is a free roof?”

“That’s one way to look at it. If we don’t go solar, we still need a roof. That will cost us ten grand and we’ll lose the ten grand from the solar. That means a new roof will cost us double. Is that what you want?”

“Listen,” she said, in her best final-word voice. “Let’s get the roof done, and then we will revisit the solar idea. One thing at a time.”

I prepared to walk away. The truth was bare. Then she thought of a quip and her eyes popped. “I know what. In the meantime, you can become obsessed with solar energy and go research it and write about it for the next three weeks, and I can watch Rachel.”

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.