New Solar Install

[woferry]

Did they give you any indication of how many are being done? How many crews there are? All near the bay area or are they starting to branch out a bit?

No, I don't know. It definitely sounded like they had multiple crews in the Bay Area, but I don't know if that meant 2 or more. I don't know about other areas. They initially tried to schedule me for late-December, but holiday travel got in the way for me, then we were scheduled for mid-January but they called it off last second due to some supply issue, then proposed early February but I had to reject again due to a mid-February trip, then things finally got started late February. The difference between their proposed Feb date and when we actually got started sure felt right for one more install in-between, not sure if they did another project late-December also. And they were clearly off to start another one as soon as they were finished with mine. And these are 'second generation' roofs, there were at least several of the 'first generation', which were the early employee installs and I presume some of the ones done early last year also (the UL listings show two different PV modules, a "25W" and a "24W", I'm assuming the 25W's are the first-gen).

Do you know if venting under the underlayment is critical? I'd guess possibly so to keep the tiles from overheating? I wonder what they'd do on a house with a hot-roof cathedral ceiling (that typically have closed cell spray foam directly against the underlayment)?

Since they create their own vent layer, I'm not sure it would be a big deal, but I'm just guessing. For the attic they added ridge venting for both their air channel and the attic itself. Over my garage the ridge vent is only for their air channel, they didn't open-up the roof inside the garage (which makes sense, there's no lower air intake to go along with a ridge vent anyway). My garage typically gets quite hot on a sunny day, not sure how it compares to your cathedral ceiling however.

 

[Shygar]

I had ridge vents cut into my cathedral ceilings and it made a huge difference. I think adding a roof with a 1" vent gap on top of it will just make it even better.

 

[woferry]

Oops. So, the final city inspection was this morning, there were 3 issues, but only 2 could be solved immediately. To get the inspector out again is another 2 weeks. A pair of breakers needed to be linked since the circuits share a neutral (Tesla had the link handy), an unused knock-out in one of the PV boxes needed to be filled (Tesla had the plug handy), and where the PV conduit goes from my garage wasn't properly caulked for the fire barrier (That they didn't have on-hand). While technically electrical passed and it's a building inspection issue, PG&E won't get started until the entire permit is signed-off, so +2 weeks on PTO now.

 

[abasile]

Wow, another inspection just because of a bit of caulk that any honorable installer could quickly add after the fact! It's crazy that you have to wait another two weeks, that Tesla has to meet an inspector again, and that PG&E is slow on PTOs. These are, in part, the sort of "soft costs" that keep residential solar installation expensive in the US.

Around here, it's not unusual to call for an inspection and have the inspector come out the very next day. And SCE, our utility, often grants PTO within a day of the final inspection passing. Gotta count our blessings.

Oops. So, the final city inspection was this morning, there were 3 issues, but only 2 could be solved immediately. To get the inspector out again is another 2 weeks. A pair of breakers needed to be linked since the circuits share a neutral (Tesla had the link handy), an unused knock-out in one of the PV boxes needed to be filled (Tesla had the plug handy), and where the PV conduit goes from my garage wasn't properly caulked for the fire barrier (That they didn't have on-hand). While technically electrical passed and it's a building inspection issue, PG&E won't get started until the entire permit is signed-off, so +2 weeks on PTO now.

 

[Shygar]

My PTO took 2 months because my local PG&E office had never seen a powerwall before. So they wanted transformer upgrades and all kinds of things that would have added 6 months to my PTO, but eventually they worked it out with Tesla engineers and just granted me a special exception. Assuming they don't have to worry about that anymore.

 

[SoundDaTrumpet]

My PTO took 2 months because my local PG&E office had never seen a powerwall before. So they wanted transformer upgrades and all kinds of things that would have added 6 months to my PTO, but eventually they worked it out with Tesla engineers and just granted me a special exception. Assuming they don't have to worry about that anymore.

This reminds me about how Powerwalls are not configured to export to grid. Early on, I was overly wishful that Powerwall can help with demand response and be helpful to the grid in more ways than just virtually removing a home off the grid via self consumption. Both the utility and homeowner benefit monetarily with demand response programs. I wonder if Tesla is going to allow export to grid soon, and even so every Powerwall home will have to go thru the PTO process (engineering calculation & transformer upgrades if needed) to begin exporting.

 

[miimura]

This reminds me about how Powerwalls are not configured to export to grid. Early on, I was overly wishful that Powerwall can help with demand response and be helpful to the grid in more ways than just virtually removing a home off the grid via self consumption. Both the utility and homeowner benefit monetarily with demand response programs. I wonder if Tesla is going to allow export to grid soon, and even so every Powerwall home will have to go thru the PTO process (engineering calculation & transformer upgrades if needed) to begin exporting.

I think this is the main reason that we have not seen a "Virtrual Power Plant" demand response system from Tesla. They would need some major cooperation from the utility and new blanket rules in order to do it.

 

[Shygar]

This reminds me about how Powerwalls are not configured to export to grid. Early on, I was overly wishful that Powerwall can help with demand response and be helpful to the grid in more ways than just virtually removing a home off the grid via self consumption. Both the utility and homeowner benefit monetarily with demand response programs. I wonder if Tesla is going to allow export to grid soon, and even so every Powerwall home will have to go thru the PTO process (engineering calculation & transformer upgrades if needed) to begin exporting.

The thing is, there's nothing physically stopping the powerwall from exporting to the grid. That's the whole thing that was holding up my PTO. So if Tesla wanted to do this in the future they shouldn't need any more hardware from our side, as long as the grid utility will allow it.

 

[ElectricTundra]

Thanks for the info!

Electrical inspections here are same day (you call in the morning between 7 and 8 to schedule. Building can take a day or two but rarely more. PTO with Xcel Energy seems to vary but has apparently gotten much better in the past 12 months.

 

[woferry]

Electrical inspections here are same day (you call in the morning between 7 and 8 to schedule. Building can take a day or two but rarely more.

I wish it was that way here. Instead you schedule about 2 weeks out, and they don't tell you until 8am the morning of the appointment day just what time you got that day. So I learned at 8am that the inspector would be there between 8:30 and 10:30. While the official next appointment is 4/10, since it's a "1-unit" job (i.e. least amount of time required) and only requires a building inspector not an electrical inspector (which are harder to schedule), there's a chance that there might be a slot that opens-up earlier, provided it's a time that works for Tesla and myself. So keeping my fingers crossed, but not really expecting anything there.

But I did get a tiny bit of a preview. On Tuesday I got a visit from an 'Installation Quality Control' person, who spent about an hour inspecting the outside electrical bits, and then on Wednesday after the failed inspection Tesla completed the commissioning of the system, both times where parts of the system were online for a bit (looks like also the day the inverters were wired-in a week earlier). This didn't occur to me until I was starting to work up a script to mine the gateway's information and I compared it to the data from my Rainforest Eagle (which has been collecting data from my PG&E SmartMeter for over 2 years now), and noticed that for the first time ever the 'demand' value had gone negative and the to-grid value was finally non-zero. So that was a first. But also pretty promising considering that it was rainy on Wednesday when the 15-minute average peaked at 6841W going to the grid. So the Eagle/meter has logged a total of 9.1kWh delivered to the grid during Tesla's testing so far.



After the commissioning the Tesla app didn't "just work" (it kept saying I didn't have any Tesla products), but my first (quick) call to Tesla Tech Support got it sorted out (just needed the S/N of the Gateway to finish the registration, thankfully I had a picture of it since I was at work when I called). Interesting that the app claims the PW's SOC is 14% while the Gateway's webpage says 18%. Oh, and they need a new image for the app that shows a proper Solar Roof rather than panels.

Oh, I should add that talking to the inspector he said they'd inspected at least 10 Solar Roofs in San Jose, so while that's still a pretty small number that's more than I was led to believe, so that was a bit of a surprise.

 

[Shygar]

You will find during a storm watch that the battery seems to have more than 13.5 kWh of storage.

 

[JohnRatsey]

After the commissioning the Tesla app didn't "just work" (it kept saying I didn't have any Tesla products), but my first (quick) call to Tesla Tech Support got it sorted out (just needed the S/N of the Gateway to finish the registration, thankfully I had a picture of it since I was at work when I called). Interesting that the app claims the PW's SOC is 14% while the Gateway's webpage says 18%.

About a year ago Tesla introduced a fudge factor in the app's reported SOC such that 5% in the battery is reported as 0% in the app and that's the point at which the battery stops discharging. It's a linear fudge factor with the app reporting 100% at 100% SOC, 79% at 80% SOC, etc.

 

[Amanda T]

Congrats! I'm in San Jose as well, and am nearing the 1 year mark of operation for my solar roof. Excited to get my first "True Up" statement from PG&E to see how everything shakes out officially after a year of use.

 

[woferry]

Hi! I think you count as a celebrity for anyone who has followed Solar Roof installs. I still haven't seen any NEM-style bills, the monthly statement should give you a good idea what to expect at True-Up, doesn't it? But congrats on the anniversary, and thanks for putting details on Twitter, it sure helped with my personal research and in setting expectations along the way!

 

[miimura]

Hi! I think you count as a celebrity for anyone who has followed Solar Roof installs. I still haven't seen any NEM-style bills, the monthly statement should give you a good idea what to expect at True-Up, doesn't it? But congrats on the anniversary, and thanks for putting details on Twitter, it sure helped with my personal research and in setting expectations along the way!

After you get PTO, you will probably get one more traditional bill calculated the old way, then they will generate a corrected bill for the partial period before the PTO. You will then start getting the new horrendously complicated black and white bills necessary for NEM-MT Powerwall billing, with only the Minimum Delivery Charges appearing on your traditional blue PG&E bill.

 

[Amanda T]

Hi! I think you count as a celebrity for anyone who has followed Solar Roof installs. I still haven't seen any NEM-style bills, the monthly statement should give you a good idea what to expect at True-Up, doesn't it? But congrats on the anniversary, and thanks for putting details on Twitter, it sure helped with my personal research and in setting expectations along the way!

Ha, my 5 minutes of Twitter fame.

The monthly statements are ridiculously complicated, and I have stopped trying to fully understand them. They do provide a summary for the current month, as well as annual usage stats, but they're broken down into so many categories that it's hard to really tell what they're saying. I can tell that my most recent statement indicates that we currently owe about $55 of non-bypassable charges for May to present. We've definitely generated more power than we consumed since May 2018. My Tesla app currently says that we've generated 11,109 kWh and used 9539.

 

[woferry]

The second attempt at final inspection passed today (took all of about 5 minutes to verify that the hole was caulked and the caulk used, nothing like waiting 2 weeks for that), so once the paperwork is submitted today all that's left is the wait for PTO. So now to see how long that takes.

 

[boriszima]

The second attempt at final inspection passed today (took all of about 5 minutes to verify that the hole was caulked and the caulk used, nothing like waiting 2 weeks for that), so once the paperwork is submitted today all that's left is the wait for PTO. So now to see how long that takes.

Congrats! I like many also had solar inspected couple of times, i guess as good as solar installers are, its good to have "audit" by the city and or electric company.

 

[woferry]

Well, there turned out to be even more 'fun' on the inspection side, every earlier milestone of inspections in this project the inspector's report showed up on San Jose's website within 2-3 days of it happening. I started to get concerned that the final inspection and fact that the permit should now be closed hadn't shown-up on the website more than a week after it happened. When I finally found a contact last Friday and reached out they said the permit wasn't closed, they never got the final paperwork! After more poking it sounds like the inspector went on vacation before turning in my stuff, so it was just sitting in limbo for 2 weeks. So I finally got that closed-out this morning, thanks to Tesla sending me a copy of the final signed permit they got from the inspector, and the SJ website now shows no open permits on my property. Once being certain that could no longer be a point of concern I found a contact number for PG&E's solar department, and confirmed with them that all of the paperwork is in place, and apparently it's under final review (and wasn't blocked by the permit snafu), so the rep said I'm "very close to PTO", of course until I finally get PTO it still seems like an endless wait. So not sure why PG&E didn't contact me at the start of their work like it sounds like they have for everyone else I've talked to (they confirmed that they had all the right contact info), but at least it seems like things really are moving. It doesn't help that we'll be traveling some next week, so with my luck I'll probably get PTO at the most inopportune time and end up having to wait even longer to actually throw the switches, just because nobody will be around to physically throw them.

 

[miimura]

I received an e-mail from PG&E indicating that PTO had been issued several days before the hard copy of the PTO arrived in the postal mail. However, I was in the SGIP program, so my paperwork may have gone through a different path than yours at PG&E.