Saturday, June 24, 2017
Friday, June 23, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Monday, June 19, 2017
Friday, June 16, 2017
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Suburban 5-4-and-a-door solar: We have electrical hookups!
As of this week, we have electrical hookups to our solar panels. Nothing's turned on yet, as we are awaiting approval from the city inspectors, but at least all of the hardware installation is now complete.
Here's what we have in place. It's not at all intrusive.
First, there are the solar panels themselves. Feel free to stop by and take a look at them. You honestly wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking - they show up much more prominently in this picture because it was taken from a drone. There's a tree in the front yard that hides them from most passers-by. Not that we're ashamed of them. We kind of like the way they look.
The outside of our house used to just have that one meter on the right - the typical spinny-wheel thing. Now we have two additional boxes, one that combines the sources and one that is an emergency shutoff / breaker specifically for the solar circuit.
Here's what we have in place. It's not at all intrusive.
Inside the box on the left are the combined connections and a cool internet-enabled meter that is purported to have an associated app that will allow us to see how much power we're pulling from the grid and how much we're pulling from the solar panels. It's purported because we aren't allowed to turn it on until after inspection completed.
The box on the right has some very large fuses and a big on/off switch straight out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab. We assume that this is used to shut off power from the solar panels when service need to be done on the house. We will confirm that before turning on the system - and we will find out if we need to keep large fuses in stock, just in case.
Inside the house, all of the wiring was very expertly run inside conduit like these, carefully attached to floor joists. The power feed from the panels on the roof was run down a utility chase from the attic to the fuse panel in the basement. It took a little while to get everything run, but the results look great and there are no wires on the outside of the house.
On the breaker panel are warnings that there is a photovolatic (i.e. solar) power source on the house. Again, this is for safety since turning off power from the grid no longer means turning off power to the house. (Not that we can actually use power when the grid is off. For safety reasons, we don't want to be generating power back into a downed wire so the system is designed to shut off when the grid goes down.)
There are more warnings inside the breaker box. We were actually tapped out on the breaker box, but the installer was able to put in some half-sized breakers and expand the capacity without installing a new box.
Overall, we are very happy with the results so far and are eager to get the system running! It's starting to get hot out there.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Monday, June 12, 2017
Friday, June 09, 2017
Thursday, June 08, 2017
Wednesday, June 07, 2017
The Impact of Power Conservation in the Suburban 5-4-and-a-Door
In preparation for a solar panel installation, it is important to understand your current electricity usage so that the panels can be scaled appropriated and the expected return on investment (ROI) can be calculated. As we are getting panels installed on our home now, I requested as many back bills from the power company as they could provide. In my case that turned out to be about 4 years' worth of bills. We scaled our installation based on our recent power use, but the total data was entertaining for a numbers-oriented person to analyze.
The ROI calculations will come later, once we have the electrical hooked up and have been running it for a while. What was interesting even before hooking up the solar array is the obvious impact we found from our multi-year electrical conservation efforts. You always wonder if the little things that you're doing actually make a difference. In this case, they certainly have.
When we first moved into our home, we replaced a lot of the incandescent bulbs with compact florescents that we moved from our old home. Compact florescents don't work in a lot of fixtures and have their own problems, but they were the only efficient options at the time. However, in the last few years LED lighting has really come into its own, and we started slowly replacing all of the lighting in our home with LEDs. At this point, nearly all of our lighting is LED-based inside the house, including the can lights in the basement and kitchen where the lights stay on the most.
We also made a few other changes, including putting in a clothesline for use in the months where pollen isn't terrible and/or rain isn't an issue. There are likely are other factors contributing, but the weather was generally the same for these years and we didn't spend any extra time with all of the power turned off. Which is to say, this isn't intended as a scientific analysis of the impact of any particular method, just an encouraging note to anyone who might be trying to save electricity and the associated costs.
Here's the graph that matters. This is the amount of energy (kWh) used in a year, graphed by the last date in that year. Usage peaked around 19,500kWh in the year ending August 1, 2015. Since that time, usage has steadily decreased. For the most recent year (ending May, 2017), usage was down about 20% from the peak. That's pretty good return for some minor changes. There was some worry that the amount spent would not have a similar drop, since a portion of the bill is fixed and does not change with usage. However, the amount spent reduced just a bit more than usage (21% versus 20%), probably due to fluctuations in power pricing.
If anyone is interested in the numbers behind the graph, here are the daily power usage numbers pulled from those 4 years of bills. For most months, the usage dropped year-over-year, as the graph above would suggest. There are exceptions (I have no idea what happened in August, 2013), but the trend is obvious. Our usage is consistently down, year-over-year.
The ROI calculations will come later, once we have the electrical hooked up and have been running it for a while. What was interesting even before hooking up the solar array is the obvious impact we found from our multi-year electrical conservation efforts. You always wonder if the little things that you're doing actually make a difference. In this case, they certainly have.
When we first moved into our home, we replaced a lot of the incandescent bulbs with compact florescents that we moved from our old home. Compact florescents don't work in a lot of fixtures and have their own problems, but they were the only efficient options at the time. However, in the last few years LED lighting has really come into its own, and we started slowly replacing all of the lighting in our home with LEDs. At this point, nearly all of our lighting is LED-based inside the house, including the can lights in the basement and kitchen where the lights stay on the most.
We also made a few other changes, including putting in a clothesline for use in the months where pollen isn't terrible and/or rain isn't an issue. There are likely are other factors contributing, but the weather was generally the same for these years and we didn't spend any extra time with all of the power turned off. Which is to say, this isn't intended as a scientific analysis of the impact of any particular method, just an encouraging note to anyone who might be trying to save electricity and the associated costs.
Here's the graph that matters. This is the amount of energy (kWh) used in a year, graphed by the last date in that year. Usage peaked around 19,500kWh in the year ending August 1, 2015. Since that time, usage has steadily decreased. For the most recent year (ending May, 2017), usage was down about 20% from the peak. That's pretty good return for some minor changes. There was some worry that the amount spent would not have a similar drop, since a portion of the bill is fixed and does not change with usage. However, the amount spent reduced just a bit more than usage (21% versus 20%), probably due to fluctuations in power pricing.
If anyone is interested in the numbers behind the graph, here are the daily power usage numbers pulled from those 4 years of bills. For most months, the usage dropped year-over-year, as the graph above would suggest. There are exceptions (I have no idea what happened in August, 2013), but the trend is obvious. Our usage is consistently down, year-over-year.
Unfortunately, the savings is going to impact the solar panel ROI since ROI will be based on what we were spending originally and our spending is down. We'll see how those numbers come out starting sometime next month, hopefully.
Tuesday, June 06, 2017
Monday, June 05, 2017
Friday, May 05, 2017
Thursday, May 04, 2017
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
Tuesday, May 02, 2017
Monday, May 01, 2017
Friday, April 07, 2017
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