Mike Yu

Mike Yu is the editor of SmallSolarCo. He started it after working out that a plug-in panel was the only kind of solar available to him — he rents in Irvine with a west-facing balcony and no roof of his own — and found that nothing written about it in California was both plain and sourced.

He is not an electrician, a solar installer, or a lawyer, and the site says so wherever it matters. What he does is read the primary sources — bill text, CPUC filings, utility tariff sheets, UL standards, manufacturer specification sheets — and put them in one place with the arithmetic attached and a date on every claim.

He has a background building web products, and built the savings model here himself, using NREL irradiance data and Southern California Edison's published rates. It's published in full on the methodology page, and the site's tests fail if an article and the calculator ever disagree.

What this site does and doesn't do

It explains, catalogs, and calculates. It does not test hardware. Kit pages are built from published specifications with the date they were checked, not from a test bench, and the site says so rather than implying otherwise.

There is a plug-in kit on the Irvine balcony logging output, which is used to check whether the model is roughly calibrated. Figures from it are labelled measured and carry their conditions. Everything else on the site is labelled as an estimate, and there are far more estimates than measurements.

Editorial independence

Affiliate commissions don't reach the savings model — it's the same arithmetic for every kit, and the current recommendation for anyone spending under $400 is a nonprofit that pays nothing. We don't accept hardware on terms that involve anyone approving coverage first. If a manufacturer sends something, the page says so.

Reach him at hello@smallsolarco.com.