Good Day, Sunshine…I need to laugh when the sun is out.
Michael,
It’s almost time to crack that bottle of champagne against our solar garage, sing the Beetle’s Sunshine tune and toast the power of the sun!
A few months after Mrs rakkity & I moved to Colorado, we started thinking about installing solar panels. Might as well put that 385 days/year (or whatever it is) of sunshine to work, we thought.
Our house roof faces east and west, which is far from optimal, but our garage roof faces nearly directly south, which is perfect. So we got bids from 3 companies. One of them, Simple Solar Systems, came in with the best offer. The second best was less than 5% behind, and their arrangement of panels didn’t look optimum to me. The 3rd best told us we could only use 6 panels because of shadowing, but both of the other companies said 10 would work.
On November 23, I climbed a ladder up to the garage roof at 8 am and 9 am just to see how much shadowing there really was. I marked the outlines of the sunlit areas with masking tape and compared my picture of that area with Simple Solar’s drawing, and found that my 9am masking tape border matched their drawings perfectly. Company #2 had panels with the wrong orientation, and they’d have been shadowed a little at 9 am in winter, so we eliminated them. Company #3 was way off, way wrong, and would get no money from us, though I know other people who have gotten good panel systems from them.
After our HOA gave its (automatic) approval to the panel installation plan, Simple Solar ordered the PV panels from California. Finally in January, SS was ready to come install them. A snowstorm delayed them one day, but the next day at 8 am they were up on the garage hammering away, and were ready for the panels to arrive. Snowstorms in California delayed the panels a couple of days, but they arrived yesterday, and by late afternoon they were all installed. The electrical connections and control panels are all there, but they need one more day to get the Boulder inspector to permit them turn the system on.
I shot some pictures of the electrical meter running forward. Maybe next week I’ll be able to show some pictures of the meter running backwards!
–rakkity
Here’s an album of the solar panel installation.
Comment by rakkity — February 9, 2008 @ 12:48 am
we have a dorm with solar panels, this building is off the grid
Comment by goose — February 9, 2008 @ 1:21 am
Rakkity, very cool! {Both of those two 2-car garages yours?}
Wanna hear all the stats on Watt-Hours saved!
Comment by smiling — February 9, 2008 @ 11:10 am
Only one of the garages is ours, Dan. Our neighbor’s garage, to the south, would have been optimum, but she didn’t want to trade 😉
Goose, do you have batteries to store the solar power?
Comment by rakkity — February 9, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
What rate do you get, in Colorado, for selling electricity? Some states have negotiated decent minimum rates; many haven’t.
Comment by jennifer — February 9, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
I just had a lecture on energy efficient buildings the other day and getting those pannels is not only a very smart move but a great one to help move this society in the direction which it needs to head in, green.
Comment by joe — February 9, 2008 @ 2:17 pm
The gory financial details for Dan–
The local power company, Xcel, pays us $2.00 per nominal watt at the time of installation. (We have a peak-rate 2100 watt system, so that means we get $4200 off the cost). In addition to that, we get an up-front Reward Estimated Credit of $5250 from Xcel, based on the projected 20-year production of 60 MWh by our system. And then Uncle Sam pays us $2000 in a tax rebate. Our net cost is about $6000 for a $17,500 system.
Additionally this year we should save about $310 that we won’t have to pay in our monthly bill, and more per year as electricity costs rise. According to a projection by Simple Solar that includes the rising costs of electricity, the system should pay itself off in 12-13 years.
Colorado’s green political climate and lots of sunshine make this one of the best states for putting PV panels on your roof.
And so far I’ve said nothing about cutting back on CO2 production (would that be a political statement, Mike?)
Comment by rakkity — February 9, 2008 @ 5:41 pm
Answer to Jennifer’s question–
We would get the wholesale rate for excess electricity. I think that’s about 3-4 cents per kWh. But we’ll probably never have a month in which we use less electrical energy than we make. (We use about 450 kWh per month and will produce about 250 kWh per month.) So our saving will consist in not paying for those 250 kWh, rather than getting Xcel to pay us.
That being said, our meter will run backward for about 4 hours on sunny days, but will run forward the rest of the time.
Comment by rakkity — February 9, 2008 @ 6:34 pm
I’m sorry if I made it sound like I don’t think it’s wonderful, regardless of the cost-benefit analysis; I do. I have a further question about how the selling-back works: let’s say in one particular period of time, you used 1 kWh less than you were making, and in another period of time, you used 1 kWh more than you were making, would you owe $0 for those two periods, or would you owe the difference between wholesale and retail rates for 1 kWh? (I’m assuming you’d owe the difference.)
Comment by jennifer — February 9, 2008 @ 7:51 pm
For the record, I’m not the one opposed to things politic on this blog. I think it’s a group consensus.
Did I tell you that I trained Dan to provide coffee for the builders of his garage? Every morning at ten (after my lecture) he stood outside in the cold with a steaming carafe of Triple A Arabica in one hand and a ringing, dainty brass bell in the other.
Comment by michael — February 9, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
Always a pleasure to see you walk your talk, Rakk, and that we get such fabulous blow-by-blow accounts of your adventures is a sweet bonus! Discounting the statistically improbable — like wheel bolts off airliners — are those panels anything like foolproof, likely to be maintenance-free for the 12+ years of payback, even beyond? What IS their rated life, BTW –what do you do with them at the end of it, and what projected increases in efficiency are likely in that interim, do you think?
Comment by el Kib — February 10, 2008 @ 9:33 am
If I’m rakkity I’m thinking this is my last blog post.
Comment by michael — February 10, 2008 @ 10:43 am
Hi,
Can we add a link to this post on our blog – http://simplesolar.com/category/blog/?
Thanks.
Mary Iannotti
Marketing Director
Simple Solar
Comment by Mary Iannotti — February 10, 2008 @ 2:22 pm
I’m eager to hear the answer to that question! (This is just one of many reasons why I don’t have my own blog.)
Comment by jennifer — February 10, 2008 @ 2:51 pm
Link away, Mary.
Looks like you better answer the rest of those questions, rakkity.
Comment by michael — February 10, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
I love answering questions, so ask away!
They tell us that the panels will last 30 years, which is the point at which their efficiency degrades by some fixed amount (25%?). But of course, long before 30 years, a new technology of solar cells will provide much higher efficiency (watts-out per solar watts-in). Our garage roof is due for replacement in 10-15 years, so the panels will have to be lifted off then (not hard) so new shingles can be put on, and if some new miracle panels have appeared on the scene, we could swap them out if we wanted.
One possible caveat–if you don’t have close-by, observant neighbors, the ease of panel removal means someone can steal your panels (it happens). But we’ve got close-by neighbors, and they’re always watching with shotguns and mad dogs at the ready (you hear that, you panel thieves?).
Comment by rakkity — February 10, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
Jennifer, in answer to your question: They subtract the kWh provided by our panels from the kWh used by us over the course of one month. If the number is negative, we are credited with the wholesale net cost, and if it’s positive, we pay the retail cost. (At least that’s what I infer from the literature.) In other states than Colorado, you may get nothing, or more or less for negative kWh.
Comment by rakkity — February 10, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client.
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Comment by Martin Crumlish & Greg Jacobs Emperor Social — May 11, 2013 @ 8:59 pm