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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, time for the inspection cycle again…
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Think they’ll get out before the end of the month?
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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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…
Nice. Are your panels self-clearing with snow, or do you need to go out and brush 'em daily?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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