OK, so maybe I’m not harnessing the power of the lighting bolt, but the sun works well too. I’ve been patiently waiting as Acro Electric has been installing the solar system for the house, and more importantly the power to charge the car as well!
I kept climbing up on the roof when I’d get home from work to see what they had accomplished.
Day1:
Here is a picture of some of the anchor bolts installed for one of the two groups of panels.
Here is a close-up of one. You see all the black caulking that goes into the drilled hole. Additionally the black piece of flashing will be over the bolt and hole with the higher shingle laid over this as well see later. This flashing allows most, if not all, of the water never even get near the hole.
Day2:
Here is the south facing group of rails installed. You can now see how each anchor is covered by the flashing and slide under the higher shingle.
Here is a picture of the west facing group. I didn’t have much south facing roof space so half of the panels went here.
Day3:
The panels and inverters are brought in for installation. The panels are from SunPower model SPR-225-BLK-U. They are small and rated for 225 watts a piece, which is quite a bit especially for their size. There are two inverters SPR-3000m and SPR-4000m. As you’ve probably guessed they are rated for 3k watts and 4k watts respectively. There are 28 panels total for a DC/STC rating of 6.3kW. This is fancy rating they give to “lab conditions” and you won’t see these numbers in the real world. Therefore another rating is given (CEC/CSI) which is a “real world” rating of 5.56kW. The physical roof footprint is 393 sq.ft.
Here is the south roof again with the panels installed. They are a nice solid black color, you can’t see the PV cells like you can with the other panels.
The west facing group.
Here is the west facing group again with some perspective of how little roof space was needed for half (3.15kW) of panels. I could really add a lot more if I need to.
Day 4 and 5:
The last couple days was doing all the wiring and finishing touches on the system.
Here are the two inverters mounted in my garage. You can also see the new 220v plug I had them install while they were at it for the car charger. I was running a long, and rather big, cable across my garage before.
Today was the first day they got to fully operate over the entire time frame of sun light and they produced 40kW. I’m pretty sure as summer really kicks in we’ll get even more out of them.
Related posts:
- In the name of science
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