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.
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.
Today the guys picked up from where they left off yesterday, prepping the South and East facing roof for the solar panel rails. I have a ton of respect for these guys, I’ve been up on my roof and it’s not something for the faint of heart, over 35′ at the apex and they were working without a net so to speak.
These guys are fantastic, they are electricians, installers and from what I learned today, roofers, they literally have to take the roof tiles out, screw down the custom stand-off’s for the panels, cut the roof tiles to fit and re-install them, pretty impressive, oh and I just found out they are also painters, they asked me for the color of my home so they can purchase the color to paint up the conduit that will run down the side of my house, this is actually an HOA requirement but they could opt to have me do it at my expense.
Here are some pics from today’s work, the panels arrive on site tomorrow, 54 * 205 watt panels for a whopping 11-thousand watts of pure green power!
Today was the big day, the solar panel install began today, the installers arrived at 8am and started work on installing the dual inverters, the PV generation meter and cut off switches as well as some preliminary work in the main house electrical panel.
Day 2 will include more wiring and interconnecting the system to the house panel and depending on progress may also include mounting the roof rails where the panels will be mounted to.
Here are some of the pics from today’s work, clicking any will take you to the album.
My new toy, 2009 Suzuki SV650S, this confirms it, I’m 45 going on 15. The Harley will wait, besides, Harley’s are great, when you get old and I’m not there yet!
Today I finally had some good daylight and got a chance to take some pics of my new baby, as always click the pic to be taken to the album.
So this weekend it was Nemo on Ice, this is Hagan’s 2nd show in 2 weeks, also her 2nd Disney on Ice show. The show overall was ok, not as good as Monsters INC., to me the audio was really low and the lighting was not as good as it should have been, in fact the follow spots were dragging behind the talent and in some cases just not there at all. In the end it was all about a 3 (going on 4) year old and that’s all that matters, it was for her and she had fun.
We were at the Wiggles today, the New Wiggles where Sam is the new Yellow Wiggle, as always they put on a great show for all ages! Clicking the slideshow will take you to the Google Pics site and you will be able to see full size images, as they were intended.
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