Miguel Lombana

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!

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.

I just received the blueprints for my solar power system which means, the design of my PV system is complete! In the end, the roof allows for 17 panels on my southern roof over my garage which are the bread and butter of the system, especially during the winter months when the sun is lower and in the southern sky, combined with 37 panels on my eastern roof which provide for true sun-up to sun-down solar generation!

The 54 Evergreen 205 watt panels will generate 11,070 watts of power at peak generation or basically exceeding my power consumption during daylight hours to where I will not be purchasing any power from APS if the sun is shining. Thanks to the design, I will be pushing excess power onto the grid where APS will be giving me a credit for every kilowatt that I supply to them that they can in return sell back to other users under their green energy program, so in the end everyone wins!

Now we move to the permitting phase, followed by the install phase early next year, if the timeline holds, this system will be up and running by March 2010 and I’ll be living off the grid, goodbye 500 dollar electric bills!

Till the next update and as always, follow the progress on the SOLAR page link above.