The honor of a "guest" post has been bestowed upon me, the hubby, for one of our final entries. As this will likely be my one and only direct contribution to the documentation of our journey, I have splurged on an abundance of technical descriptions and jargon not previously seen.
The latest development, and the last major component of the house, is the installation of the solar panels. We've installed three strips of six SunPower Model 327 panels each on our back roof, for a total of 18. They run through two SPR-4000m inverters to connect to the grid, with six panels on one inverter and 12 on the other. The inverters are tied directly to CoServ’s grid, but we’ll use the power that the panels generate throughout the day, with the excess going back to CoServ, our electric service provider, for a credit. During the peak of the day, you can watch the electric meter run backwards, and, yes, it’s a pretty good feeling.
Each module is capable of generating up to 327 watts, or 5.8 kilowatts total for all 18. Pending some final changes to our breaker box, we currently only have the one inverter with 12 panels online, but it's been running for a few days now. And just as we’ve only had a couple good rains since putting in our water capture tank in November, we’ve only had a few clear sunny days. Based on the results that we’ve seen with 12 panels active, we should be able to generate about 27 kilowatt-hours (kWh) on a clear day, and even more in the summer, when the sun’s at a better angle for the panels. Cloudy days can still produce 5-10 kWh for the day. As you can see from the morning and afternoon production on the graph below for the past three days, the angle of the sun is important. Did I mention that we get some pretty cool monitoring tools? The red dots represent the amount of power being generated at the given time and the yellow dots represent the cumulative power produced to that point in the day. You can see the red dots fluctuate on cloudy days (Friday was really overcast, and it was partly cloudy in the morning yesterday, while today was a beacon of efficiency!).
The goal was to produce about 60% of our electricity use. CoServ uses the default net-metering, which essentially means that while they’re happy to take back as much power as we feed to them, we will only be reimbursed up to a certain level. Hopefully, as solar becomes more mainstream and as they get more incentives to look for alternate sources of energy, they’ll work on modifying their systems and policies to remove these limits and encourage more homeowners to participate. We were, however, able to participate in CoServ’s rebate program, which reimburses us $5,000 for the cost of the equipment and installation. We also expect to receive several thousand dollars in tax credits to offset the expense, but we don’t have specific numbers on that yet.
May 2013 bring each of you a year of sunshine and may your cloudy days be filled with double rainbows.
Chuck
POSTSCRIPT FROM LORI: For those of you who glazed over or dozed off during the Hubs spiel due to the technical BS he provided, I will put it in Lori terms (which is considered normal people terms, but hey, the geek talk pays the bills in this house and is therefore not a dirty word). Sun good, rain good (because the tank fills up), overcast, not so wonderful. Suffice it to say, we are excited to cut down on our electric bill, use rain water to water the lawn and fill the pool and to do out part for the environment!
Happy New Year to Everyone and may your 2013 be the best year yet!!!!!!!
Love and recycle
Lori
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