You won't accrue the benefit of tax breaks until your next tax filing, which can take over a year or more. In California, rebates are paid directly to the contractor, so they're not a part of your cash flow at all.

3) Locate contractors and go out for formal bids. Talk to as many contractors as you can. Get them to come to your house and look at your situation in some detail. They can't give you an accurate quote until they do. If they quote you a price over the phone, it's only an approximation.

4) Choose the best contractor and write the contract.

5) Wait for equipment to arrive (it's rarely stock), approvals for building permits, subsidies, tax breaks and so on. Expect this to take up to six weeks or more.

6) Allow for installation and inspections by the county and utility company. Installations typically take a couple of days. The county inspectors will look at your system and certify it. The utility company is very concerned with your system because you'll be feeding potentially dangerous power back into their grid. If a utility employee is working on the grid somewhere nearby, he or she could get a nasty shock from your system if it's not shut down.

7) Wait for the utility to put in a new meter and connect to the grid. When everything is ready, the utility company installs a new power meter and officially hooks you up. Now you're in the power generating business. Woohoo!

8) Get a tutorial on how to operate your system. Your contractor needs to walk you through the entire system and explain the hazards and proper operation. You should be aware of potential problems and how to identify them. At this point, you can watch the display on your inverter cranking out numbers. Your contractor should explain exactly what the numbers mean.

9) Submit any paperwork to utilities, states, and so on for final rebate payments. Rebates aren't payable until the system is in place and working properly. If your contractor is receiving the rebate directly, you don't need to do anything.

10) Adjust household habits to optimize system payback. Up to this point, everything has been educated speculation. Now reality sets in. Is the system operating the way it should? To the level it's capable of? Is power consumption occurring at the right times of the day? Are the savings what you thought they should be? If you're on a tiered rate structure, or a TOU rate structure, you will probably need to change some consumption habits in order to capitalize. Talk to your contractor about the things you can do, and if the system is not producing the way it was projected, why that may be the case. Most of the time, it's not the system, but the operation that is causing the discrepancy.

11) Maintain and repair the system. In Murphy's immortal words, "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." Even while the system is under warranty, the contractor has to be called and notified in case of trouble.

12) Expand in the future. The best tack (strictly from an investment standpoint) is to install a smaller system than you think you need and allow for the possibility for future expansion.

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Rik DeGunther is a design engineer and the founder of Efficient Homes, an energy consulting firm in Northern California that focuses on home energy audits and the design of efficient heating and cooling systems. He also writes weekly op-ed columns for the Mountain Democrat newspaper.

This article is excerpted from Solar Power Your Home For Dummies by Rik DeGunther, copyright © 2008, with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons.