Solar...

As of February the solar is finally installed and working as it should have been back in August. It was a major drama to get the solar panels installed due to the SIP roofing. Apparently most solar installs involve driving bolts through the roof into the building frame... But we don't have a building frame, the SIP is our air tight layer, not to mention we don't want a bunch of thermal bridges. It took contracts with two different companies (not being a standard install was too much for most companies contacted about the installation), and eventually it took two install attempts by the second company when the first bracket they tried did not fit as required.

The very big tree that shades our roof made it a bit hard to predict the generation capacity, but our 5.22kW system is generating power that would be expected from an unshaded ~ 4kW system (~ 17kWh / day). Which more than offsets our typical consumption ~ 7kWh / day.

Once we have enough data I'll post a more detailed analysis.

Basic system summary: 14 x 375W Longi Solar Half Cut Modules with Enphase IQ7+ Microinverters. No battery due to budget constraints and the highly speculative nature of determining how much power we would generate / consume. The hope is that in a year or so we can actually answer the questions of generation and consumption... and hopefully battery prices will become cost effective.

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