Size to what you use in daylight
New customers enroll in Tier 4, which credits excess energy at 75 percent of the retail rate. Every kilowatt hour you consume as it is generated avoids a purchase at the full retail rate instead, so the two are not equivalent.
That argues for a system matched more closely to what your household actually uses while the sun is up, rather than one built to cover your annual total and export the difference. The surplus still earns credit, but at three quarters of what it would have saved you.
Ask your installer to model the self-consumed share explicitly for your household rather than quoting an annual offset percentage. Two homes with identical arrays and different occupancy patterns get different results, and the model should reflect yours.
Ask for two or three sizes with that share shown for each. Seeing where the return stops improving with size is the clearest way to make this decision rather than accepting a single proposal.
The changes that cost nothing
Raising the self-consumed share is the cheapest improvement available to a Nevada solar owner, and unlike equipment it can be adjusted at any time.
Pre-cooling the house in the early afternoon while production is strong is the biggest single opportunity, because air conditioning is where most of the electricity goes in this climate. A programmable thermostat makes it automatic.
Running laundry and dishwashing during daylight, and scheduling any vehicle charging for the middle of the day rather than the evening, do the same thing for smaller loads. A pool pump is worth looking at specifically, since it is large and entirely schedulable.
None of this is dramatic individually. Together, on a system sized close to your consumption, it is the difference between exporting a large share at 75 percent and using most of it at full value.
How credits behave, and where a battery fits
Excess energy pushed onto the grid earns credits, which are recorded on your electric bill and automatically applied in the next billing period in which you consume more than you produce. So credits do carry forward and get used rather than expiring each month.
What they do not do is close the gap between 75 percent and full retail. A battery does exactly that, by holding production for the evening when the house is drawing hardest and the array has faded.
Ask for that as arithmetic rather than a recommendation: how many kilowatt hours per year would move through the battery, the value difference between exporting them at 75 percent and using them later at retail, the cost of the storage, and the period over which the difference repays it.
Ask separately what the system does during an outage. A grid-tied array without storage shuts down during an outage as a safety requirement, and a battery sized for bill savings is often not the same as one sized for meaningful backup.
The tier you join, and the federal credit that ended
New Nevada customers must enroll in Tier 4, which credits excess energy at 75 percent of the retail rate. Tier 1 credited 95 percent and closed in August 2018, Tier 2 credited 88 percent and closed in June 2019, and Tier 3 credited 81 percent and closed in June 2020.
Customers keep their tier for a period of 20 years at the location where the net metering system was originally installed. That is a long commitment attached to a property rather than to a person, and it is worth understanding before you sign.
Because a neighbour who installed in 2018 or 2019 is on a materially better tier than you can join, their reported payback is accurate for their project and is not a guide to yours. That is not them being misleading, it is a different arrangement entirely.
On the federal side, the 30 percent Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a cash or loan purchase now receives no federal credit. Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners under leases and power purchase agreements, so ask any such provider what they claim and what of that value reaches you, and confirm with a tax advisor.