Syonyk's Solar Status: Rough-in completed

Energy
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Well, one moment of sheer panic later, solar is online, approved, net meter swapped in, and purring away at over 7kW on a clear day. I’ll have good graphs from future days this week for the different arrays.

The inspector from the power company showed up and looked over stuff, then informed me that he couldn’t approve it, because my disconnects weren’t the sort you could visually verify as open, and circuit breakers weren’t a permitted AC disconnect. I’m using Midnite Solar disconnects as combiners, which have an external lever to toggle circuit breakers internally.

Redoing this with disconnects would require an awful lot of rework on the system, likely new permits, inspections, etc, so… I more or less requested, “Prove it… because I don’t recall reading anything like this, though the website is hard to navigate at times.”

Turns out, he was thinking of older guides. The current guide, which he had a copy of and I found on the website, simply requires “The switch must be manually operable with a visible ON and OFF indication, and capable of being locked in the off position. Draw-out or other types of disconnects are not acceptable.” Based on this, a circuit breaker based disconnect is perfectly acceptable, so we got past that and moved on.

The main check is simply that the inverters take >5 minutes from seeing AC power to kicking on. Mine, despite a 5 minute setting, take… enough longer that I was beginning to worry about them, but kicked on at 5.5 minutes or so. I guess they were just lazy about looking for grid power or something.

In any case, after deciding that my disconnects do meet the guidelines, I got my meter swapped (for the same physical type, just different programming), and things are online and purring away!

Woo!

14

Solid accomplishment - not just the build but the saga of navigating a serious bureaucracy. Pour yourself a well-deserved cold one. The tax breaks and net metering returns are icing on the cake at this point.

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Such a comfort, knowing the Idaho Power people work so hard to stay up to date with their own standards…

Glad it worked out though, and with almost two months to spare before the deadline!

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Woo, 54kWh generated today, and I’ve pushed about 50kWh to the grid in the past 2 days. I’ll build up what I can before winter hits!

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I have most of a full day’s data, and it demonstrates the difference between south facing panels and my A-frames.

This is the south facing panel, and represents a “typical” solar facing. We’re in the wrong timezone, so solar noon is about 1:30 PM. This is 6 panels, 1770W nameplate, peak production of around 1450W or so. Today, 10.37 kWh, or 1.72kWh per panel.

My east A-frame inverter demonstrates the perks of the A-frames - a far wider production curve. Data logging glitched briefly in the morning, but you can see how it rises to a good power rating far faster (these are twice the scale of the north frame, 6kW vs 3kW inverters), peaks around 3kW, but is above 2.5kW for most of the solar day. You can see it’s slightly “chopped” at the end of the day, and that’s shading. This frame produced 22.7kWh today out of 24 panels, so 0.94kWh per panel. The sun is rising/setting south of east/west, so there’s not as strong an advantage to the east/west panels right now, but in the summer, when the sun is rising well north of east/west, these will be online far earlier when south panels are still literally backlit. Also, on a cloudy day, panel area is king, so I can still pull energy out of the sky on darker days.

The west array is a bit lower, physically, than the east array, so has shading a bit longer in the morning. It went from 200W to 2200W over 15 minutes, give or take, as the shading disappeared. The curve is a bit smoother in the evening, as it’s not being shaded then. 21.68kWh today (because of morning shading - the two run basically identically when fully illuminated), so 0.90kWh per panel.

Again, the south panels are more efficient per panel, but the overall curve of power delivery is far flatter with the east-west panels, and they’ll really come into their own on both cloudy days and in the summer when the sun is rising to the north and is up at 35 degrees by the time it hits due east.

Total production looks like this…

Again, fairly flat and wide compared to a south facing curve. There’s actually a bit of a mid-day peak that was intended mostly for vehicle charging. Peak is about 7.5kW right now, but it holds 6kW from 10:30 AM to 4PM.

Total production on a clear day was 54.4kWh, which is rather substantially in excess of our daily energy use (we didn’t drive anywhere today). Trying to build up and bank hours for winter. I expect I’ll be pulling net power from the grid this winter, just because I won’t have enough time to build up the kWh bank, but I expect after next year, I shouldn’t have to pay for power for 25 years.

At this point, I basically just let it run and try to ignore it… instead of watching my power delivery curves. I may get a battery powered leaf blower to blow some dust off the panels on an occasional basis.

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From a monitoring perspective, it’s awesome that you have a “load” that will take all the power you can throw at it! My main challenge monitoring off-grid systems is the data I have is more a function of both battery charge deficit and panel-angle/cloud-cover/etc.

image

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Yeah, the grid is kind of nice that way!

Looks like a lead acid charge curve, though I’m not sure if you drop to float or not there. I think that little drop from the absorb curve might be float, but if it is, looks like you’re dropping a bit early. Of course, if it’s sealed, that may be the best for it - I’m more used to flooded lead acid, where “beating the crap out of them” is the way to long life.

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Yeah, it’s a 100AH SLA battery and you called it on the drop to float;

image

That’s with the default settings a Epever 3210AN thinks are good for a 100AH SLA battery… I’m still learning this stuff :slight_smile:

Hope I’m not co-opting this thread - just though the commentary on monitoring advantages of the “infinite load” of a grid-tied system vs off-grid were worth highlighting.

21

Go ahead and toss that in another thread. I disagree pretty hard with their voltage settings unless it’s super hot out, and the gradual taper down in float would argue that it’s not fully charged anyway. You are temperature compensating, correct?

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22

Welp.

Project isn’t done.

Their guidance document didn’t mention visible disconnects anywhere, the guy inspecting it couldn’t actually find it anywhere, but, gosh, I just didn’t read Schedule 72 fully enough (and neither did the guy inspecting it), and buried in there is the requirement to visually verify the actual conductors. So a clunky knife type switch is needed.

Also, my switch can be locked in the off position, but it doesn’t fit the (rather oversized) hasp of the Company Standard Locks. Which, I sure as hell can’t find the hasp diameter anywhere in their documents, I suppose I just haven’t read all 1500 pages carefully enough.

Anyway, it’s being left on until told otherwise, and I’m waiting for a phone call to verify what, exactly, will meet their requirements. Hopefully I can just inline it between the other disconnect and the breakers, because otherwise I have to basically redo the entire side of the house. And I may still have to, I’m pretty sure I don’t have enough wire slack in one of my boxes to replace it with a different style, which means ordering new wire, pulling new wire, etc.

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Welp.

After clarification, it’s shut down, and I apparently have to do a plans review again, which will push me into about June, and I’ve just lost net metering. And the tax credit.

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After DBS talked about it amongst themselves, they decided that changing out the disconnects was minor enough that it didn’t need new plans review. The re-opened the permit and I ordered parts, and as everything showed up yesterday, I took today and did that which I always seem to do on Saturdays, worked on solar.

In any case, this is the minimum amount of rework I was able to come up with to get things all using visible disconnects, or whatever the proper term for that style of disconnect is.

IMG_9712

What’s the difference from the old stuff? You can see the conductors that have moved out of the path of electricity, because circuit breakers… don’t, I guess, if you’re a power company. Caution: Keep fingers out. Those things snap rather violently.

IMG_9709

So, time for the inspection cycle again…

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Think they’ll get out before the end of the month?

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Hopefully. Everything else has been a single day latency.

DBS came out today, the guy more or less laughed at why I had to change perfectly good disconnects out with… IMO, far worse disconnects, and gave me the sticker I need. “We need these to keep people who have installed non-listed inverters off the grid!” seems remarkably pointless when the sort of person who would toss a random inverter on their system would also be the kind to bypass a cutoff trivially… probably with under-gauge wire they had laying around. In any case, no problems with the DBS inspector, which is good. I’ll be doing more work at some point and having him associate me with quality work makes my life easier. He did mention that non-permitted solar installs happen on occasion out here.

Hopefully Idaho Power can make it out tomorrow, although… I’m not at all sure what state I’m at in their system. As near as I can tell, based on emails received and the online portal (that shows generation for a few days), I’m fully set up and net metered (with the grandfathering I was hoping to get), and could have been operating this last week without being billed for exports. But someone else told me I’d be billed if I exported. So, no idea. Hopefully resolves tomorrow or later this week at the latest. Would be nice if various parts of the company would talk to each other.

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27

Alright.

And done.

Power company came out, the guy was quite annoyed by having to come out here yet again (not at me, he felt my disconnects were perfectly fine the first time), stuck the stuff on, and I’m good to operate.

… as winter hits.

On the plus side, on cloudy days, the whole “lots of panel area” thing works nicely. When my south facing panels were producing 200W, each of the A-frames, with 4x the panel area, was producing right around 800W - as expected.

In retrospect, I probably didn’t need as large of inverters as I hung. I’ll see what peak summer production is, but I probably could have gone with a 4 or 5 kW inverter instead of the 6s. On the flip side, stuff won’t ever be running that hard.

Now to finish writeups…

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Nice. Are your panels self-clearing with snow, or do you need to go out and brush 'em daily?

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Ask me when we’ve had snow.

They probably aren’t fully self clearing, but should clear decently as soon as they get any sun. My expectation, based on office panel behaviors, is that if we get actual sun, they’ll clear promptly, and if it’s cloudy/snowy/etc, I’ll have to take a broom out to get any production off them.

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You can really see when the system got approved for operation again… about Nov 9th or 10th. I’m still chewing plenty of power from the grid, but it’s dropped significantly, and we’ve got a week or two of sun forecast, with brutally cold temperatures, so… good production for the length of the day with cold panels, at least.

power_use_solar

I’m currently 480kWh “in the hole” with the system, from those two weeks of not operating it at all with the net meter installed. I should be 1-2MWh in the hole by spring, depending on winter weather, and work that off over the summer. In theory. Hopefully the last season of power bills I’ll have for a long while…

And, yes, I know my house uses “a lot of power” by many people’s standards. But it’s pure electric, for literally everything, to include water (we have a well), and most of our transportation (Volt). If we had city water and gas for thermals, it would use radically less.

Production for Nov so far. The days before the 9th were backup outlet use, running some opportunistic loads. Not actual grid export.

production

And, there had been a question about snow shedding: Seems good to me so far! They don’t shed evenly, but I didn’t have to do a thing and they started dumping snow as soon as it got above freezing. I don’t expect they’ll hold more than a few inches before it slumps off, but I should find out more this winter.

sun_shed

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It looks like roughly every other panel did a better job shedding snow. Does that pattern appear on the other side and/or other A-frames? Do you have a hypothesis about that? e.g. Is it correlated to where those panels are wired in each string?

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Don’t know. It was cold and nasty and I didn’t actually go out to them to look.

However, the pattern doesn’t entirely hold, and each of the 12 panels on each side are wired in series - so there shouldn’t be any difference between them. It might relate to how the A frame fits under it, or it might just be random. I don’t have enough data points to have a good guess yet.

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