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@woferry - If its the worst happens that you are travelling and you get PTO.. haha First world problems. Ask you neighbor if you trust them. glad to hear moving slowly
Well, my luck turned for the better and I got the PTO email from PG&E this afternoon! Flipped all of the switches when I got home at 5, managed to produce around 5kWh before the sun went down, all of which either powered the house or the PW, brought it up to 25% so at least it won't be sitting at 0 any longer. I did switch everything off, so it will be a few days before I get a full day of testing out of it.
Turns out the installer had made two mistakes on the CTs (so all 4 had issues), when the inverters first came online the gateway still showed no solar or Powerwall, and instead my household consumption more than doubled (0.6kW -> 1.6kW), while my meter was running backwards. One of the two inverters (presumably the bigger one) was looped backwards through the solar CTs, so it must have looked like consumption to the gateway and it ignored it. Once I fixed that it then showed ~4kW coming from the solar, ~1.7kW going to the PW, and 3.3kW coming from the grid to power my home at 5.6kW (mind you I hadn't turned anything on compared to the ~600W "idle" house state, and the meter was still running backwards). Turns out there was a problem with the grid CTs as well, because the meter and original service panel share a box with no place to put the CTs for a proper "grid" measurement, the two breakers that remain in that panel were passed through the CT (so the 100A to the gateway and the 30A from one of the two inverters). Everything looked good when I switched that inverter off, so I turned its wires around in the grid CTs and suddenly everything was reporting properly (also started putting all of the solar that wasn't going to the house into the PW). So I stopped exporting anything, but at least stored some more energy to bleed-off over the next few days.
But all of the "paperwork" is finally behind me, now to actually start producing energy! Oh, and now I officially feel like I can start challenging all of those people calling Solar Roof "vaporware".
Lucky you. Congrats. It made sense for you to flip the switch as I see you had to make some changes. You moved electrical wires yourself?Totally, but it would be my luck with the way everything has gone. No, I want to be there when the switches are flipped, to make sure nothing bursts into flame or such. Even if I got PTO tomorrow, while I'd consider racing home to give it a try I'm not sure I'd leave things on without being able to watch it more closely (I would like to get the PW above the 0.008% SOE it's reporting right now, however). So at least one more week of paying for electricity consumption.
Lucky you. Congrats. It made sense for you to flip the switch as I see you had to make some changes. You moved electrical wires yourself?
We have been all electric in Western NY for quite a few years. Geothermal costs us about 150/month for 2800 sf and cathedral ceilings. Hybrid water heater (heat pump) and superheater in the geothermal costs 90/year (not month) on which I put a meter.Tesla's online quotes of $11/ft^2 for non-solar tiles and $42/ft^2 for solar tiles, plus $10,100 for a single Powerwall, do include installation according to Tesla's website. It's understandable that they would charge extra for "non standard" work. Your project does seem to have been more involved than "normal". However, I'd be curious as to how close Tesla's final prices come to the quoted figures for more "typical" jobs. When Tesla installed our two Powerwalls, the final price was spot-on compared to the initial quote, but there weren't any significant complications.
Also, for extra stuff like removing additional roofing layers, I wonder how Tesla's prices compare with most roofers.
That's totally understandable! If anticipating a potential solar roof, and one's budget allows, preemptively getting rid of natural gas stacks might be ideal. But it may not be ideal from the standpoint of cost. Within the next several years in California, I'd be surprised if there aren't new state and/or utility incentives to encourage property owners to switch to all-electric appliances and heating systems. We have a forced air natural gas furnace at our primary home, and it would cost more than $10K to replace it with heat pumps to cover all of our rooms, so we're waiting for costs to drop.
Heat pumps are designed to run more or less continuously, so the air that they output isn't as hot as from a forced air gas heater that essentially heats the home in bursts. However, an advantage of a heat pump is that it won't tend to reduce the humidity level in the house to really low levels during the winter, as it's simply recirculating the air in each room. We switched to a heat pump at another, smaller family home and it worked quite well all winter, including in February when temperatures frequently dropped into the teens (Fahrenheit). If the old gas heater still works, I agree that keeping it as a backup makes sense - why not, if it doesn't cost anything?
Dual-fuel means that you have an electric induction stovetop and a natural gas oven, right? In our case, we were doing a lot of baking and we were tired of the indoor emissions from our natural gas oven, so we just went all electric. Most home ovens aren't vented particularly well, and the exhaust gases just go into the home's living space. This includes carbon monoxide, of course. It also includes a lot of water vapor. Previously, whenever we ran the oven for long periods, we noticed condensation on the insides of our windows, but this completely stopped once we switched to electric.
We have an "on demand" tankless water heater at a rental property, due to space limitations, and I'm not a big fan. We also had one at a previous residence. Maybe they've improved in the ten years since we last installed one, but our experience with tankless water heaters is that they can be finicky about changes in the hot water flow rate. If you're in the shower and you attempt to adjust the flow of hot water, you may get nailed with an unexpected blast of cold water. In addition, we haven't noticed much in the way of natural gas savings.
It's currently possible to buy a heat pump water heater at Home Depot for less than $1200, for a 50 gallon tank. For a mild climate or a location such as a garage or basement that's not directly exposed to cold outdoor air, this might be a good option.
Degradation is not quite as good as the standalone Panasonic panels. These degrade about 0.5833% per year or about 17.5% after 30 years.The tiles, or the inverters? The inverters are covered for 10 years. The tiles have breakage, weatherization and production warranties.
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it's not clear with just this text if: they will replace any malfunctioning tiles, ignore bad tiles if your overall average doesn't degrade much, or just somehow credit you the production difference annually.
Thanks, this part is reassuring. The fact they mention underperformance/underproduction and link it to repair/replace is clear and transparent.