What a kilowatt of panels produces in Langley
Natural Resources Canada rates Langley at 992 kWh a year per kilowatt of installed solar capacity, modelled on a south facing array at a sensible tilt with nothing shading it. That is the yardstick to hold every quote against. A 6 kW system, a common size on a detached house, works out to roughly 5,950 kWh a year on that basis, and a 10 kW system to just under 9,900 kWh. If a quote assumes materially more than that per kilowatt, ask what it is doing differently.
Treat 992 as a ceiling rather than a forecast. Every degree your roof turns away from south costs you output, a chimney or a neighbouring conifer that clips one panel drags down the whole string it sits in, and a shallow winter sun angle does the rest. In practice the spread between a good Langley roof and a mediocre one is wider than the spread between Langley and a sunnier part of the province, which is why the site survey of your specific roof matters more than the regional average does.
Output is also strongly seasonal. Long June days do most of the annual work and the short overcast stretch from November through February contributes very little. That shape is not just trivia here: it is the summer surplus, not the winter shortfall, that decides how much of your generation leaves the house rather than being used inside it, and under BC Hydro's current rules exported electricity is worth less than electricity you consume yourself.
BC Hydro no longer offers net metering to new customers
Langley homes connect to BC Hydro, and the arrangement that used to make residential solar arithmetic simple here has closed. BC Hydro shut net metering, Rate Schedule 1289, to new customers on 1 July 2026. A system connected today enrols instead in Rate Schedule 2289, the self generation rate, which covers systems up to 100 kW.
The difference is narrower than the headline suggests, and it pays to understand it precisely rather than to assume the worst. Your panels still power your house first: whatever the array is producing at any moment serves your own loads before anything reaches the grid, and your generation is still netted against your consumption inside each billing period. What ended is banking. Under the old rate a surplus stayed as kilowatt-hours and offset a later bill at whatever retail rate applied then. Under 2289 a surplus at the close of a billing period converts to a dollar credit at a flat 10 cents per kWh, applied against your energy charges.
Because that fixed rate sits below what BC Hydro charges you for energy, a kilowatt-hour consumed inside the house is now worth more than one pushed onto the grid. Anyone who tells you a new Langley system will be on net metering is working from pre July 2026 information, and the sizing advice that goes with it will be wrong in the same direction.
One thing has not changed. BC Hydro's time of day pricing is opt in. The standard residential rate remains tiered, and you stay on it unless you actively choose to switch. Installing solar does not move you onto peak and off peak billing by default, so no quote should assume it does.
Most Langley roofs are not house roofs
Langley's housing stock is unusual for a city of 28,963 people. Of its 12,595 dwellings, 59.1% are low-rise apartments, well ahead of single-detached houses at 21.3%. High-rise apartments barely register at 1.7%. That mix, not the sunshine, is the single biggest determinant of who in Langley can actually put up panels.
The practical issue is control of the roof. In a detached house you own the roof outright, the decision is yours alone, and the array gets sized against your own consumption. In a low-rise apartment building the roof is common property, one surface serves many households, and the project needs a strata decision rather than an owner's signature. That is not a dead end, but it is a slower and more formal path, and it raises a question a single family install never has to answer: how the electricity produced gets allocated between common property loads and individual units.
If you are in the roughly one in five Langley homes that is single-detached, you have the straightforward version of this. If you are in the majority, the realistic first step is finding out whether your strata has ever looked at it, because a low-rise building actually has an advantage over any individual house in town: a single large roof plane at a shallow pitch, serving many households, is a better mounting surface than a small steep one, and there is more of it.
Sizing a system to your own daytime load
The practical response to the 2289 rate is to shift as much of your consumption as you can into the hours the panels are producing, and to be honest with yourself about how much of your load already falls there. A house that is empty from eight to five exports most of what it makes on a clear June afternoon. A house with someone home during the day, an electric vehicle that charges in the afternoon rather than overnight, or a heat pump running through the shoulder seasons keeps far more of its own output.
Storage is the other lever, and it is the one that changes the arithmetic most. A battery holds midday production and releases it in the evening, which converts an exported kilowatt-hour into a self consumed one. BC Hydro's rebate carries part of that cost: up to $1,500 for storage paired with solar, calculated at $500 per kWh of capacity with a 5 kWh minimum and a 50% cost cap, and up to $5,000 where the battery is enrolled in Peak Saver.
None of this is an argument for a small system on principle. It is an argument for matching the array to a load you have actually measured. Download twelve months of consumption history from your BC Hydro account before anyone quotes you a size, and ask each installer to show the split they are assuming between self consumption and export instead of quoting a single annual production number that treats both as equally valuable.
Rebates and financing a Langley homeowner can still use
BC Hydro's residential solar rebate pays $1,000 per kW of installed generator capacity, to a maximum of $5,000, capped at 50% of total installed cost. Two things follow from that structure. The per kilowatt payment stops climbing once the ceiling is reached, so a larger array earns no further rebate. And on a small install it is usually the 50% cost cap that binds first, because the inverter, the electrical work and the crew's time do not scale down in proportion to the number of panels.
Since 1 June 2026 the work must be carried out by a member of the Home Performance Contractor Network for the rebate to apply. That makes contractor selection a gating decision rather than something you can correct after the fact, so confirm membership in writing before you sign. Taking the rebate also places you on the Self Generation Service rate, which for any new Langley connection is where you were going anyway.
Federal support has thinned. The Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest free up to $40,000, stopped accepting new applications on 2 October 2025 and now only funds loans already approved. Its replacement, the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, launched in September 2025 and delivers no cost retrofits through provincial partners for low to median income households; solar is eligible federally, but each province sets its own technology list. Canada still has no federal investment tax credit for residential solar of the kind that exists in the United States.
British Columbia has at times exempted qualifying solar equipment from provincial sales tax, but the scope of that exemption moves with provincial budgets. Confirm the PST treatment of the specific equipment listed on your quote at the time you buy it, rather than carrying an assumption forward from an older article or an installer's brochure.