Lately I’ve found myself checking my power meter to see if it’s running backwards and my production is exceeding my consumption, since I’m using the air conditioner more in the daytime while working from home, I want to make sure that running 2 computers, plus the AC and usually the TV on CNN, that I’m still able to do this using the power of the sun.

Happy to report that my system has no problems keeping up with my daily demand. I did however find that while cooking a chicken dinner in the oven last week, that I had to turn off the ceiling fans in the bedrooms to get my meter to spin backwards. Reality, the fans should not have been on in the first place since I wasn’t in any of those rooms, so I wasn’t being very green

Thankfully the chicken came out great, my daughter was happy with dinner and I found that I can cook dinner at 4pm and have the TV on in the living room without using any power from APS!

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, 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 stucco 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 amazing 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 on site, 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 shifted back to mostly electrical, 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!