Okie dokie. Installed, inspected, PTO, and turned on. Now, to make the neighbor's house shorter…

[run-the-joules]

(Kiddddding… mostly).

Got PTO for my 8.1/8.6kW system today and managed to get in about an hour of production before the sun fell behind my neighbour's house.

Happened to glance at the documents and realized that the paperwork with PG&E says they used 355w panels instead of 340w like were quoted!

I'm actually quite thrilled with how much I'm generating late in the day with the low winter sun (in the summer, the solar angle shouldn't cross the neighbour's house like this), this bodes very well. 2 weeks until the winter solstice and then it's all improvements for a while

 

[getakey]

Congrats

 

[run-the-joules]

Congrats

Glad to be in the cool kids club now

 

[jboy210]

Those are pretty good numbers for this system this time of year. We are seeing under 2 kWh at that time of day. And the shortest day of the year and the least solar are in 2 weeks. From there it is more power generation every day until late June.

 

[jedmo]

Keep us updated with a full days production.

 

[run-the-joules]

Keep us updated with a full days production.

Count on it!

I'm compulsively refreshing the app as the sun rises

 

[charlesj]

Tell your neighbor that his house is interfering with the sun you should be getting. You will be getting a permit to trim that 2nd story.

 

[jboy210]

Tell your neighbor that his house is interfering with the sun you should be getting. You will be getting a permit to trim that 2nd story.

Option 2 is for the OP to add another story to their house and shade his neighbors on both sides and behind.

 

[run-the-joules]

Tell your neighbor that his house is interfering with the sun you should be getting. You will be getting a permit to trim that 2nd story.

He's pretty cool, I dunno if he's THAT cool though

Option 2 is for the OP to add another story to their house and shade his neighbors on both sides and behind.

I was thinking I'd just get some large poles like they use to put lights in stadiums, and have a motorized, retractable mirror array that deploys above the house late in the afternoon to catch the sun from a higher elevation where it's not occluded, and reflect it down onto the panels.

 

[SMAlset]

Surprised about the substituted panel wattage. Don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention that before. Either a typo or perhaps they ran out of the 340s and wanted to finish your job before end of year so swapped out with what they could get. They do have that right under the contract as long as equal or better value. I assume the cost to them on the 355s would be more for them too.

We were under contract for the 315s before they changed up their line and instead they installed the 340s at no extra cost to us for the increase in performance. In fact when they moved to the 340s and dropped the panel price they passed that cost savings on to us so doubly pleased. Nice for you if the higher wattage ones were used. Every bit of energy helps. Congrats on PTO and joining the solar club.

How’s today looking? Interested to compare to ours—SF Bay area too and 8.16kW system.

 

[run-the-joules]

Surprised about the substituted panel wattage. Don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention that before. Either a typo or perhaps they ran out of the 340s and wanted to finish your job before end of year so swapped out with what they could get. They do have that right under the contract as long as equal or better value. I assume the cost to them on the 355s would be more for them too.

We were under contract for the 315s before they changed up their line and instead they installed the 340s at no extra cost to us for the increase in performance. In fact when they moved to the 340s and dropped the panel price they passed that cost savings on to us. Nice for you if the higher wattage ones were used. Every bit of energy helps. Congrats on PTO and joining the solar club.

How’s today looking?

I just got my solaredge monitoring access and that site says they did indeed use 340s, so yeah, might be a typo on the PG&E paperwork. I might never find out unless I get up on the roof and see for myself

So far so good for today! Oddly though I'm not sure why the instantaneous kW output isn't showing.

 

[SMAlset]

Ours just now. Our panels are on SE and SW roof sections. How is your layout? Too bad about the neighbor’s house. We have a neighbor’s house about 20 feet from ours on the SW side, both 2- stories. Our 2-story neighbor’s house facing our SE roof is a nice 50 feet away and we’ve kept our palm selection to those that only get 20-30 feet high. Happy about that now.

 

[run-the-joules]

Ours just now. Our panels are on SE and SW roof sections. How is your layout? Too bad about the neighbor’s house. We have a neighbor’s house about 20 feet from ours on the SW side, both 2- stories. Our 2-story neighbor’s house facing our SE roof is a nice 50 feet away and we’ve kept our palm selection to those that only get 20-30 feet high. Happy about that now.

View attachment 615982

So envious of your PWs lol!

The neighbour's house shouldn't shade too much when it comes to actual useful sun, it looks like. I've only been living in this house for about 3 months though, so I jumped onto SunCalc sun position- und sun phases calculator and did a bit of playing around with estimates using the relative height of the peak of his roof to my array, and it seems like around this time of year I'm gonna start catching some shade from his house and my own chimney in the last hour or so before the sun sets. Once SolarEdge gets me my API key I'll be able to start capturing much more granular data and model everything.

Here's my layout, and an almost-done pic from during the installation (note that the drone shot was from the north, so it's reversed relative to the layout pic):

 

[run-the-joules]

not bad for a partly cloudy day!

 

[SMAlset]

since we compared earlier thought I’d come back. We had some clouds in a.m. but sunny afternoon. PWs are at 100% now and typically we will charge one of our cars at noon on but didn’t happen today. Hate sending to the grid. Our first full month on solar/PWs PG&E/SVCE bill is in the mailbox today and can’t wait to see.

 

[holeydonut]

Random question for you guys - but what do you typically see as the "idle" kW that you're consuming when nothing major is going on?

My house keeps taking about 900 watts when I'm just sitting at my desk getting some work done (not really, I'm on TMC). I can't tell if that's high or low for average "do nothing" bleed. I know 100 watts is going to my air circulating blowers (I drop to 800 watts when I turn them off). But that still leaves 800 mystery watts.

Maybe it's just a lot of little stuff adding together? Like my MIL is watching TV, and my wife is at her computer too, and I have three AT&T cable boxes. I guess the cable modem and mesh wifi could be a bigger drain than I thought? I suppose those things plus having a few LED lights all adds up to around 1kW. It's not the fridge... I go up over 1kW when that thing kicks on.

I'm going to order one of those home energy monitoring things to see where the power is going.

 

[getakey]

Random question for you guys - but what do you typically see as the "idle" kW that you're consuming when nothing major is going on?

My house keeps taking about 900 watts when I'm just sitting at my desk getting some work done (not really, I'm on TMC). I can't tell if that's high or low for average "do nothing" bleed. I know 100 watts is going to my air circulating blowers (I drop to 800 watts when I turn them off). But that still leaves 800 mystery watts.

Maybe it's just a lot of little stuff adding together? Like my MIL is watching TV, and my wife is at her computer too, and I have three AT&T cable boxes. I guess the cable modem and mesh wifi could be a bigger drain than I thought? I suppose those things plus having a few LED lights all adds up to around 1kW. It's not the fridge... I go up over 1kW when that thing kicks on.

I'm going to order one of those home energy monitoring things to see where the power is going.

In the midnight to 5am, I'm using about 700 to 800 watts/hr. 2 Friges, 1 large (300 bottle) wine cooler, outside lights (LED), and then all the smart things on standby. Security cams do some occasional captures

 

[getakey]

since we compared earlier thought I’d come back. We had some clouds in a.m. but sunny afternoon. PWs are at 100% now and typically we will charge one of our cars at noon on but didn’t happen today. Hate sending to the grid. Our first full month on solar/PWs PG&E/SVCE bill is in the mailbox today and can’t wait to see.

View attachment 616129 View attachment 616131

Why do you hate sending power to the grid?

 

[run-the-joules]

Random question for you guys - but what do you typically see as the "idle" kW that you're consuming when nothing major is going on?

My house keeps taking about 900 watts when I'm just sitting at my desk getting some work done (not really, I'm on TMC). I can't tell if that's high or low for average "do nothing" bleed. I know 100 watts is going to my air circulating blowers (I drop to 800 watts when I turn them off). But that still leaves 800 mystery watts.

Maybe it's just a lot of little stuff adding together? Like my MIL is watching TV, and my wife is at her computer too, and I have three AT&T cable boxes. I guess the cable modem and mesh wifi could be a bigger drain than I thought? I suppose those things plus having a few LED lights all adds up to around 1kW. It's not the fridge... I go up over 1kW when that thing kicks on.

I'm going to order one of those home energy monitoring things to see where the power is going.

I’ll be able to give you highly accurate info on this shortly. Amazon should be dropping off my Rainforest Eagle 200 aaaany moment.

 

[jedmo]

Random question for you guys - but what do you typically see as the "idle" kW that you're consuming when nothing major is going on?

My house keeps taking about 900 watts when I'm just sitting at my desk getting some work done (not really, I'm on TMC). I can't tell if that's high or low for average "do nothing" bleed. I know 100 watts is going to my air circulating blowers (I drop to 800 watts when I turn them off). But that still leaves 800 mystery watts.

Maybe it's just a lot of little stuff adding together? Like my MIL is watching TV, and my wife is at her computer too, and I have three AT&T cable boxes. I guess the cable modem and mesh wifi could be a bigger drain than I thought? I suppose those things plus having a few LED lights all adds up to around 1kW. It's not the fridge... I go up over 1kW when that thing kicks on.

I'm going to order one of those home energy monitoring things to see where the power is going.

My house idles at 200 watts at night when the wife and I are asleep. During the day, as long as the wife doesn't turn on her electric space heater, the house idles at 400 watts, most likely due to the office room light and a few laptops/monitors being powered on. The house will jump to 600 watts when the compressor in the fridge kicks in for a few minutes. That little space heater she uses in the office draws 1400 watts, I die a little bit inside, every time she turns it on...LOL