Help for Solar Panels in Sunny Spain

When we decided to buy, and then renovate, a house here in Madrid, we wanted to make it as energy efficient as possible. For one thing, we just believed it was the right thing to do. For another, looking around most days here and seeing how much sun there is, it felt like the environment was showering us with free money. We just had to put the equipment in place to collect it. Add to that the soaring costs of energy all over Europe, and...well, it just seemed an obvious choice.

TL;DR: This post is about our experience getting the paperwork done and navigating the bureaucracy to get financial assistance from the Province of Madrid (El Comunidad de Madrid) with the solar energy installation for our home. If you're just interested in the juicy bits, skip the next few paragraphs.

Back to our regularly-scheduled program: The biggest thing that keeps most people from installing a solar-energy system is the cost. Most people look at the initial outlay of cash required, do a rough amortization, and quickly figure out they'll need to be in their house years, if not a decade or more, before they could claim to have recouped their investment. And while the cost of solar panels and related equipment has dropped pretty dramatically over the past ten years or so, the bottom line is that it still ain't cheap. 

There are an increasing number of programs, however, to help incentivize people to make the initial investment. In Spain, where government-run programs tend to move even more slowly than in the U.S., it can make someone think twice before deciding if they want to go through the hassle of applying. Add to that the fact that it's not very clear how much help one can receive, plus trying to navigate the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in making an application, and many people quickly decide they don't want to be bothered. Or if you're like me, you won't actually make a decision; you'll just put it off indefinitely because you don't know where to start and the whole thing—especially the thought of doing it all in another language—seems overwhelming.

(And please don't anyone go taking offense to my statement about the speed of Spanish bureaucracy. In a country with less than 50 million people, it took more than seven months to get our tax refund. U.S. bureaucracy is no picnic, but I can always count on getting my refund no more than 30 days after submitting my U.S. income tax returns.)

In general, the company that installs your solar energy system should help you and file most of the paperwork. Some people to whom I've spoken about this said they didn't recall having to do any work for the process. Regardless, our installer needed us to get several pieces of paperwork to add to the packet he's submitting.

The documents you'll need to provide are:

1. Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal. This is a "tax residence document". If I understand correctly, this document basically verifies that you reside in Spain for the purpose of being taxed. It differs from a couple of other, similar documents that do similar things (specifically, the Certificado de residencia fiscal España-Convenio and the Certificado de no residentes en España, which serve other purposes I won't get into here.)
2. Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario. The title of this document translates as, "Current Tax Payment Certificate". Again assuming my understanding is correct, this document verifies that your property taxes are currently paid in full.
3. Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. Like the previous document, this "Certificate of No Debts with the Community of Madrid" certifies that you don't have any other money you currently owe to the state. I'm not sure everything that this includes, but basically, the state wants to be sure you don't owe it money before it considers giving you some.

There are a few other things that will be needed to submit the application for assistance, but your solar installer should be helping you with those. The ones above were the ones that we needed to get ourselves. I'll discuss actually getting these documents in a moment.

For completeness, the other document that I know about is called the Tasa Por Presentación de Servicios Urbanísticas ("Fee for Provision of Urban Services"). Again, in our case, the solar-system installer filled it out and submitted it for us. There was an associated fee, as the title suggests, of 288€. The installer paid this for us and then billed us for it.

The million-dollar question: how do you get the documents listed above? 

This is the really valuable part of this post, which hopefully makes it easier for you than it was for us. All three documents must be obtained from the Agencia Tributaria de la Comunidad de Madrid (the Tax Agency for the Community of Madrid).

Supposedly, there is a way of requesting these documents online. After searching the website for Agencia Tributaria, however, I couldn't find any reference to them. So, in our case, we did what's worked for a number of other situations: we made an appointment to go see someone at the tax office.

In case you're not familiar with navigating any of this, you generally need to make an appointment online before you try to go see someone at the Agencia Tributaria. The same goes for anything you may need from Spanish National Government. If you make an appointment beforehand, you'll be presented with available dates and times, and be (relatively) assured of getting to see someone. In fact, there are many times when the guard at the front door to a government building won't even let you in if you can't show them evidence that you already have an appointment booked for that day. 

One other important note: Once you get inside the building, you'll still need to go to the little kiosk that doles out the numbered tickets and get yours. Without that, you'll never get called to one of the desk, whether you have an appointment or not.

So anyway, we booked an appointment. Now, the last time we went to see someone at the Agencia Tributaria, we went to the office on Calle de Guzmán. This is a huge building with several floors of information desks and cubicles and lines to wait in. The last time we went there, we kept getting sent to different departments. But that's a story for another time.

When we went online to make this appointment, we couldn't get a time at the Calle de Guzmán office that would work with our schedules. So we wound up going to the office in Alcobendas, on Calle Ruperto Chapí. It was a little farther away, but what a difference it made! Because it was smaller, if someone at one desk didn't know something, or needed some extra information, they just walked over and talked to the person at the other desk! It was awesome. 

Seriously. I'd worked to set my expectation super low, telling myself that, while we probably wouldn't get even one document we needed, at least we would gather some information that would help us decide what to do next. But I was wrong, and in a great way!! We were able to order all three documents we needed, and we were in and out in under 40 minutes!! Afterward, we went for a celebratory lunch in the mall around the corner.

Now, in true Spanish government fashion, we didn't actually leave the office with the documents. But we did leave with recibos de presentación, essentially receipts showing we'd requested each of the documents. Now we just have to wait for the actual documents to show up in the mail, scan them, and send them to our solar installer so he can finish submitting the paperwork.

Conclusion

To wrap things up:

• There is financial assistance available, offered by the Spanish government, to help defray the cost of installing solar panels. 
• There are three documents that you will likely need to obtain in order to apply (see above.)
• You can order all three documents by going to the Tax Office (the Agencia Tributaria.)
• If you're going to go to the Agencia Tributaria, you should make an appointment first.
• Going by our most recent experience, I suggest going to a smaller tax office as opposed to one of the bigger ones, even if it means you have to travel a little farther.

One other bit of info: while writing this post, I used Google to search for "purpose of Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal", and found what appears to be the place for requesting this document from the Agencia Tributaria website. Subsequent Google searches found this link for the Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario, and this one for the Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. This would, of course, save you from needing to get an appointment and go to the office. I guess my mistake the first time I searched was using the search feature on Agencia Tributaria's website. Let that be a lesson to me.

A few notes other notes on using the online government services: first, the link above is good as of the writing of this post; no guarantees after that. Second, you'll need a Cl@ve, which is used across Spanish government sites in tandem with your national ID to verify your identity and requesting all kinds of things online. I talk about how to obtain one of these in a different post. 

Everything is Normal

Todo es normal. It's become our in-joke whenever we have a problem at the house, or the tax office, or the electric company, or anywhere, it seems, we're having a problem. It's because we've lost track of how many times we've been told that after telling someone we've recently paid that we are having a problem with the thing for which we paid them. Whether it's a purchase or a service, when you have a problem with something, the first thing you'll usually hear is, "Oh, that's normal."

Take, for instance, shortly after we moved in to the house we bought. We actually bought the place last year, but we've spent the last year renovating it. That's a story for another time. Anyways, we finally moved in at the end of June. And the first morning we woke up in our new house... it smelled like a combination of poop and rotten eggs.

Turns out it was sewer gases, coming from the shower drain. But when we told the contractor about it?

"Es normal."

Like, really? It's normal for my bathroom to smell like a frat-house refrigerator at the end of the semester? Like, instead of a toilet, we had a port-o-let installed? I've moved a lot since I left home, and I've never  known that to be normal.

"Oh yes, in Madrid, if people go away for a few weeks in the summer, when they return home it's typical for the house to smell until you air it out."

Great. Except that this wasn't after a few weeks. It was after a single night. Every night.

It turned out that it really wasn't normal. The problem was a combination of issues: first, the trap installed in the shower wasn't deep enough. In case you're not familiar with them, it is common to have a piece of plumbing installed in the drain of a shower, toilet, or sink that uses water to "trap" the naturally-occurring sewer gases and keep them from coming back out of the drain. (That actually es normal.) Under the sink, it's that curved piece of pipe at the bottom of the drain, and in the U.S. it might be called a "j-trap" or a "p-trap", because the pipe is shaped like the letter "j", or like a letter "p" laying on it's face (or maybe just because it's supposed to trap the smell of pee before it gets into your bathroom.) 

In a shower, the trap is typically shaped like a bowl with a smaller bowl inside of it. Regardless of the shape, though, the function is the same: the trap uses water to keep sewer gases from coming back out of the drain by acting as a one-way valve.

So, back to the issue at hand: the trap in a shower is not, as a rule, very deep because it has to fit under the shower pan (the "floor" of the shower that keeps water from running out when you're actually using it). And because it was so bloody hot inside--due first to it being July, and second to our air conditioner being on backorder--the water in the trap would evaporate overnight. It didn't help that it's so dry in Madrid. Even if we took a shower at night, resulting in the trap getting filled with water, by morning all of that water had evaporated, freeing the gases to enter the bathroom.

So there it was: a shallow trap; too much heat and too dry a climate; overnight evaporation; and voila: poop and rotten eggs.

Fortunately, it turns out there's a solution. In older bathrooms, builders used to install a "whole-bathroom trap". This was a water trap that was usually less susceptible to the water evaporating out of it because it would be set into the floor and thus not so exposed to the air. Historically, this was done for most bathrooms because, historically, there was no air conditioning. Since everyone had to suffer with heat, evaporating water and sewer gases were more common. So someone figured out that they could solve the problem by putting an extra piece of curvy pipe--basically a j-trap--in the drainpipe taking all of the water away from the bathroom. Since air conditioning has become more common, however, the extra trap has gone out of fashion. For one thing, it's an extra piece of plumbing that has to be installed, meaning the bathroom floor has to be designed in such a way to allow extra space for it. For another, because it's a curvy piece of pipe, it's easier for clogs to happen there. And because it's under the floor, if you can't unclog it with a drain-snake down the toilet, well... get ready to rip up your bathroom floor. So, since people could add a water trap for each fixture (toilet, shower or tub, sink, bidet), which was both effective and a lot easier to unclog, the "whole-bathroom trap" went out of fashion.

Still, this elegant old solution proved it is still relevant: At the plumber's suggestion, we had him install a secondary trap under the floor of the bathroom. Fortunately, our bathroom is situated above the kitchen stairs. I know what you're thinking--You'd better hope your toilet never floods--and you're right, I do hope that. But the bathroom isn't one the whole kitchen, just the stairs. And thanks to this, the plumber was fairly easily able to go through the ceiling above those stairs (and below the shower) to access the drain pipe. And since we also had him put a little trap-door in the ceiling underneath where the drain is located, should we ever really need to, we can access the trap without having to tear up the bathroom floor.

So anyhow, that's how we got rid of the nasty sewer gas smell, and now waking up and not smelling that stink es la nueva normalidad.