News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

The contractor was out today doing some painting and checks, and briefly activated the solar power system. It was generating about 5000 watts, most of which was flowing back out of my house into the power grid. No air conditioning or TV was on, so besides my computer, refrigerator and some lights, we weren’t using much electricity.

It is a little cloudy today, high thin clouds, which reduced the power a little too, I’m sure.

Still waiting for the utility company, SRP, to approve it before we can go on full time. Hopefully by the end of next week.

They didn’t quite finish today, but all that’s left is some trim, wire termination, and a little roof repair.

Here they are installing the first solar panel:

Here’s what it looked like with several panels installed:

And here’s the finished job:

Here’s a close-up, looking up the array:

And here’s a close look at one of the clamps holding the panels down:

33 panels, each providing a peak of 240 Watts, yielding a theoretical 7920 watts (clear day, sun shining squarely on it, not too hot, etc., etc.).

Looks like there’s going to be a “Day 4” post. They didn’t finish today. I guess the rain Friday and Monday set them back a little.

Most of the work today was wiring, in and out of the attic. Not much to show, but I’ll post some pictures anyway.

Here you see where the wires from all the panels drop into the attic through that round metal pipe upper center of the picture. I don’t know if you can see it, but there are three red wires, and three black. They run from three “strings” of panels. Each group of 11 panels has it’s own connection to the inverter.

As usual, if you right click and select “View Image” you can see a lot more detail.

And here are the wires coming out of the wall above the invertor. They had to be run through the attic, not an easy job because our attic is separated into two sections and the wires had to be brought through a narrow connection.

The unpainted boxes and conduit are all new installations. The lower one is a cutoff, but I’m not sure what the upper box is for.

And this shows the conduit all finished running from the inverter through another cuttoff.

They stacked all 33 panels against the side of the house so that tomorrow they can start installing them on the roof. Notice the obstructions on the other end to keep Apollo out. Wouldn’t want him peeing on the panels!

Tomorrow I really hope to have pictures of the completed job!

Two things were accomplished today: They cut the tiles so the mounts could extend up through them, and they fastened rails to the mounts.

Here are the rails. Tomorrow they should fasten the solar panels to the rails. Looks like the ends still need to be trimmed.

Here is a close up of one mount extending through the roof tiles. You can see that they just cut the tiles with a circular saw, but I guess whatever works. Any rain that falls through this hole will land on the flashing below and come out onto the tile below.

Interestingly, I woke up Friday night about 1:00 am to the sound of rain leaking into our bathroom, “Drip, drip, drip.” I went up on the roof in the middle of the night during the rain, and moved some tiles around to help cover any openings. Turned out that the only leak was coming in through an improperly sealed exhaust vent, and nothing was damaged. Things look pretty tight now.

The job should be finished tomorrow, with solar panels attached and wiring complete, though at the rate they worked today I’m not sure if they will be able to finish up. We’ll see. After they are done, it will take another couple of weeks to get city and utility inspections before it can be turned on.

We have approvals from the city of Tempe, the HOA and the utility company, so we are ready to move forward and install the solar panels on our roof. Construction is scheduled to begin this Friday (November 4), and be complete on the following Tuesday.

Inspections and final approval will take another 1 – 2 weeks, so activation should be mid-November. I’ll write an update when it is active.

I posted in February about installing a new hybrid hot water heater. Although the initial price was almost $1000 higher, it is supposed to cost less to operate.

6 months later, I have some data. Comparing kilowatt-hours consumed in 2011 with 2010, my average monthly bill is $43 less than it would have been at last year’s usage. So I would expect in a year to save about $515, paying for the extra cost of the heater in less than 2 years.

Of course every year is different, and this is hardly a scientific study. And it doesn’t include the coldest winter months when a heat pump is less efficient. But it is interesting, none-the-less.

Later this month or early next month I will have my solar panels installed, so that will make it harder to track the savings from the water heater as everything will be changing.

HP announced a couple of days ago that they were going to discontinue their “TouchPad” tablet. They decided to clear inventory by reducing the price to $100 for the 16GB, or $150 for the 32GB version. The web and retail stores immediately were hit by a buying frenzy that is still going on.

Most of the stores are sold out, but you can still find them online. I bought three — one for me and one for each of my kids. I bought the first two directly from HP last night — their server was so overloaded that it took me about 2 hours before I could finally get to the confirmation page. I got the third this afternoon from Amazon. They are now sold out, but Barnes and Noble still has a few.

They are not quite as cool as the Apple iPad, which is why they weren’t selling well at $400 and $500. But at $100 and $150, they are a great deal.

They won’t get here for several days. I’ll post my review here after it arrives.

About once a year I check the price of adding solar photo-voltaics on my roof, and every year decide that it’s still too expensive, and the payback is too far out.

This year things finally look good enough, with payback estimated to be about 10 years. Tax credits and utility company rebates cut the cost of the system in half.

I’ll be getting a total of about 8 KW, which should cut my electric bill to less than half. Excess power will be credited back to me; in effect (but not actually) turning the meter backwards. There should be times, especially in the spring and fall when the days are longer but we don’t use the air conditioner yet, when we give back more power than we use, in which case it will carry forward as a credit to the next month.

We’re going with American Solar Electric. They estimate that the installation will be complete in late September.

I know Richard is way ahead of me on this — by using batteries he can be “off the grid” and survive without any power other than the sun most of the time. My system will be “grid tied”, with no storage capabilities. So when the sun goes down I will be completely dependent on the power company.

I’ll keep you updated here as things progress.