First week of solar

Well, in the first week of solar generation, we’ve generated 215 kW! Now if every week would be as good, we’d be thrilled. Even on a cloudy day, we still generated 11 kW. We’re waiting on information so we can install the Fat Spaniel web monitoring, and in the meantime, I’m manually keeping a daily record of our generation: http://www.desktopdesigns.net/solar

We’ve put our Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor meter to use to see just how much our appliances are using. We have a 15+year old freezer that we thought might need replacing with a more energy-efficient model, but when we checked the actual energy use and cost, we found it’s only costing about $10.32 a month to operate. Kind of hard to justify a new freezer for those costs.

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We’ve got Solar!

Well, after weeks of delays, which I won’t go into detail on, we finally got our solar panels installed this week.

While our system is smaller than what was originally quoted to us (due to roof layout), we did end up with a larger system than we thought we were going to get.

We have 32 Sharp 210w panels – 22 on the front, East-facing side of the house totaling 4.6kw and 10 on the South-facing side, for a total of 2.1kw. Total system size of 6.7kw.

It is interesting to watch the panel generation as the sun changes. The front went into standyby mode about a half hour before the south side, and restarted earlier this morning.

A few pictures of the install process:

The rails installed on the roof:

The first panels:

Inverters in the basement:

3 x 3 array over the family room:

And the finished project:

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