Coming straight off an Alaska cruise, you’d think that would be the most exciting thing on my mind. I promise, those photos are coming soon, we just haven’t sorted through them yet. When I had someone check the roof for hail damage, I was hoping they’d say the roof was fine and didn’t need any work. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. However, having a new roof put me in the position to do something I’ve been waiting for… adding solar panels.
When we picked this house a few years ago, it had exactly one tree – the silver maple near the back property line – and a small mulberry shrub. The mulberry is taller now (I’ll trim it down after mulberry season, for real this year), and we’ve planted an assortment of trees around the yard, all still fairly small. In other words, we have minimal sun blockage over the roof, making solar panels ideal. As with many home improvements, I opted to go through Costco when selecting a company. The sales rep was able to come out a couple days after we provided our contact information to the guy at our nearby Costco, and fully explained the process before I signed a ton of documents agreeing to the installation and the financing.
A week or so later (it’s all kind of fuzzy because I dealt with siding issues for so long), someone came out to photograph the space and check our circuit box to see what might be needed there. Sooner than I expected, I received an e-mail offering us an installation date… the week before our Alaska cruise. We deferred, as I had a ton of meetings at work that week, we had packing to do… and we weren’t quite done clearing the space in the garage they needed to do the work.
Overall, the installation went smoothly. There were clearly defined teams working on different pieces of the project – people installing the panels on the roof while another team did the electrical work inside and outside the garage, and another person on day two to install the backup battery. (The options were no battery, just a backup, or a fancy battery and pushing power back into the grid.) There was, of course, one hitch: the electrical team noticed some issues with previous wiring work done in the circuit box which were outside the scope of the equipment they came with. I’m working to get an electrician in to fix the box issues before the inspection, hoping (unlike my siding) for a pass on the first try. The inspecting organization (this varies by locality) will then notify my electric company that it’s approved so they can flip a switch and bill me for far less than they currently do.
Anne and I have found our solar panels to be a Good Thing.
We’ve tracked their performance and we generate about half of what we use here off a (currently) 3.6 kW installation. The house generally ticks over at about 500 W give or take a bit depending on the time of day and what we’re doing. Boiling the kettle, or using the oven or washing machine increases that usage, of course. Spare energy is firstly diverted into our buffer tank to provide hot water, which is successful enough that we probably won’t need to use any oil in the boiler until September. Once the buffer tank is hot enough, we export surplus energy to the grid.
The next stage is to add a battery and increase the capacity of the panels. Owing to the way things are done on this side of the pond, we need electricity company approval to un-hobble the panels we’ve got to allow them to produce at their full capacity of 5.5 kW, and our hope is that this extra capacity will help to charge the battery. We could also do this on the cheap overnight rate (which we currently use to charge the car), hoarding cheap electrons overnight for our use during the day.
The other aspect of this exercise has been to look carefully at what devices must be left on all the time (e.g. fridge, freezer, heating system bits, etc.), what’s desirable to leave on (server, telephones, data cabinet) and what should be switched off when not in use. One of the easy wins for us was to change all our light bulbs over from incandescent to LED.
All this has helped us to knock a big hole in what we pay for electricity and, to a lesser extent, heating oil, and we think the break-even time is likely to be six or seven years.
I hope you find it as useful as we have.