To help keep their revenue stream steady, companies like Standard Solar have to come up with innovative ways to attract customers during the slower seasons. That’s what Standard Solar is doing with their “Double Your Savings” discount in Pennsylvania and Maryland, which ends March 31.

The discount program offers new Standard Solar customers up to a $1,000 discount on a new solar array in addition to the other incentives and rebates they can qualify for.

“We want to drum up business coming into spring and wanted to make sure that [homeowners] are incentivized to do it in the spring. But it’s also coupled with incentives,” said Rick Berube, Standard Solar’s vice president of operations.

For instance, the grant funding for solar in Pennsylvania is in its fourth stage and final stage and has fallen to 75 cents per watt.

“It’s not as much as it used to be, but it’s a good incentive to go green,” Berube said. In all, Pennsylvania residents can qualify for about $3,000 on a system, not including the Standard Solar discount under the grant program.

Discounts are based on the amount of money a Standard Solar installation will save the homeowner in electricity costs over a two-month period, Berube said.

“What we’re saying is, if you sign up now, if you have a $500 bill now, we’ll save you about $300 a month,” he said. Under the promotion, the homeowner would also receive an additional discount of about $600.

The other reason for getting people to do solar now is to even out the work load for Standard Solar.

“We do the majority of our installs in the early summer months. Hopefully this will make a lot of people who wanted to wait longer do it earlier. There’s less of a backlog right now,” Berube said. In the summer months, he estimated, the company is installing between 400 kilowatts and 500 kWs per month, or between 80 and 100 residential installations.

Standard Solar will also launch “spring into savings” discounts in April, May and June, Berube said. But the discounts will only cover one month’s electric savings because the systems will offset more of a home’s electricity use at that time of the year.

The majority of the company’s business is in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but the company is also selling systems in Washington, D.C., Virginia and Delaware and is expanding into Ohio and New Jersey, according to Berube.