Miguel Lombana

Back from a phenomenal weekend in Miami, the reunion was off the hook and brought back a ton of memories.

The biggest highlight other than the reunion was enjoying some of the best Cuban food in the free world outside of Cuba itself! Since there isn’t 1 single authentic Cuban restaurant within 100 miles of Phoenix, the experience of Versailles at 3am with Ivette, Terry and Ivette’s friend from PR, was amazing and all my taste buds were on overload!

Finally seeing some of my best friends and specifically a special day insulting the geeks at the Apple store in the Galleria after several Martini’s made it the best vacation I’ve had in a long time!

My Solar equipment is now officially live and signed off by the power company, you can even look at my systems real time stats on the following link!

< Solar Live Stats >

Party in the city where the heat is on. All night on the beach til the break of dawn Welcome to miami (bienvenido a miami)..

Amazing what you can find online these days, I was cruising the web for something and happened on a couple of items from when I first broke into radio. Dated circa 1986, these 2 little gems are from when I was on the original Power 96 Miami, the station was in the middle of transitioning after having just signed on as 96.3FM, being sold a few months after going live, changing it’s name to Power96 and moving to the frequency it’s been on ever since, 96.5FM.

The Power Play List is just after we changed from 96x to Power96 and I was one of the fortunate part timers that were kept on staff, everyone else that was with the station from Day 1 as 96x such as my very good friend Stuart Elliott whom I credit with starting my radio career were all let go. I actually used to deliver these play lists to all the local Miami record stores until we opted to just drop them entirely in early 1987.

I was with the station from late 85 to early 87 when I went back to club work, I only came back to radio in 1992 after running into Bill Tanner at Ace Music in Miami where he gave me the lead on going back to radio and I landed a job at Waxy 106 Miami.

The 2nd picture was from our 1st time in the Coconut Grove Bed Race in 1986, we painted and prepped the bed at my house in North Miami the team was (L-R myself, Mike Ritter (bottom center), Mark Moseley (top center) and Stuart Elliott, we lost to WSHE that day and the bed was used 1 more time the following year at the new Ft. Lauderdale Bed Race where we again lost to WSHE, in all fairness it was their event.

Enjoy!

Well the Maricopa County Building Inspectors were at my house to go over the work done on the solar panel system and I can proudly say the system was signed off and I’m only 1 inspection away from turning the system on!

The next and final step is the inspection by APS my local power utility to accept the install and allow it to join their grid.

I’m 2 to at the most 3 weeks away from watching the meter spin backwards and saving a ton of money!

Wow time seems to fly by more and more these days, it’s already February, didn’t 2010 start a few days ago?

Anyway, I think I’m onto something, my new diet, all the essential food groups, pictured here:

After the guys were done yesterday I had to run to a meeting and didn’t have a chance to take some final pics so this morning after I got moving I took the walk around the Lombana compound and grabbed some final pics of the install.

I noticed some amazing detail that the installers did that I hadn’t noticed yesterday, but not only did they paint the conduit that goes up the side of my house, they also painted the conduit that is on my tile roof to make it blend in! The details that these guys did was nothing short of astounding!

Today was the day I’ve been waiting for! The crew doubled in size today, they manged to pick up another crew that was actually working on a neighbors house and they came over and helped to hoist the panels into position, screw them down and wire them together.

The job went exceptionally fast, one guy took care of prepping the panels, another hoisted them to the garage roof where the panel was used by either the crew working over the garage or the crew working on the roof, they were done in less than 1 hour!

Again I can’t say enough about Pablo my foreman, he really did an amazing job in keeping me informed and I didn’t bother them too much so he had no real issue with taking a few extra minutes to explain to me what was next in the process.

The guys really went out of their way, they purchased the paint colors for my house from the original paint vendor and didn’t try to do a match from Home Depot or Lowes, this in my opinion was huge, but they even went so far as to paint over an area on my house where a woodpecker had made his mark and I had to fill in the area with an emergency stuco repair, I could have and actually asked if I could borrow their ladder for 5 minutes to do it, before I was done getting ready, the area was painted! Just an amzing crew, I really can’t say enough good about them.

After everything was wired in, they flipped the breakers on the inverters and after about 5 minutes they syncronized to the grid, one inverter was producing about 2500 watts and the other about 4500 watts, easily more than enough for me to run my house without buying any power from APS my local utility! Pablo in fact stated that my meter should be running backwards and when I took the picture, he was right, the arrow was pointing away from the lightbulb I had free, pure energy! We even generated about 6kw hours before we shut the system down.

Sadly I can’t leave it on until 2 more inspections, sometime next week the county should be here to certify the work and then after that the utility will come onsite, verify the system is safe to tie into their grid and I will at that point be left with the system turned on or Solarcity will have to come back and fix whatever APS isn’t happy with. The estimate is about 2 to as many as 4 weeks before all this is done.

Either way, I’m super happy with the work these guys did, and am super happy to have 54 black beauties on my roof ready to save me money!

The panels are here!!! Today work shfted back to mostly electical, panel wiring, cabling from the inverters back to the main panels and starting the runs from the roof down to the inverters.

The big thrill to day is seeing 54 Evergreen Solar 205 Watt PV panels on my back patio, the project is reaching it’s peak because the panels will likely hit the roof tomorrow and start getting wired into the inverter panels.

The end is near and here are today’s pics!

Work today continued on the roof rails, they were finally mounted to the stand offs and the racks started to take shape. That’s really about all the work that was done today, it’s a ton of work but tomorrow I’ve been told that the real hardware will arrive on site and more electrical will be done.

Enjoy the pics!