New to Grid Tied Home Solar...

[Jim Nelson]

Most of the scams are lease situations where the scammers put the panels on your roof and sell you the electricity at a reduced rate and they pocket the tax rebate and any excess power generated. You never own anything and in most cases they make it very difficult, if not impossible, to sell your home without the buyers assuming the rip off lease.
In our situation we own our system outright and the vast majority of the time it supplies more than we use. Through the net metering system we are in with our power company they buy back any excess but at a reduced rate. The generator is only a standby source and only runs when the grid is down for whatever reason. It has become common practice for the power companies to shut down when the National Weather Service predicts windy weather. This is because their outdated equipment falls apart and starts fires that have killed hundreds of people and destroyed billions of $ worth of property.
If you plan properly it saves a lot of money over time.In our case the initial investment was paid for with money my wife inherited from a great aunt who died childless and left the money to her. It was a case of either paying taxes on the money or getting a 30% tax rebate by investing in solar. Pretty easy decision.

 

[ultrarunner]

Solar was at my home... just never commissioned.

Components are 12 years old but still have not paid for a kW of grid power and even received a true up check for a couple hundred bucks... what's not to like?

Home nearby went foreclosure... the leased solar company did not bid so lost out.

New owner is a lawyer and cut a sweet deal on existing system...

 

[aczlan]

I would think needing to run a generator to allow power use from solar seems kinda nuts. What am i missing. If your needing to run a generator, why use solar

The inverter will only produce power if it senses power coming from an external source.
That is to prevent back feeding power into the grid when it's down.
It can be "fooled" by an inverter or a generator providing power to the output side to make it think that the grid is up.

Aaron Z

 

[ning]

I'm 99% done (commissioning the system tomorrow!) installing a PV/battery system with microgrid capability. The PV inverters are designed to be able to (effectively) throttle down if the batteries are full and load isn't being the full PV output possible at the time.

Without "smart" inverters, you can't operate without the grid because as others have wondered, you need to have somewhere to dump the excess power. Think of it like your PV is producing super high pressure water and either you need to use it all, store it (which is also "using" and there's a maximum), dump it into the lake (the grid), or... stop producing it. So, no grid and no throttling inverters? No pv power can be produced at all.

My system is sized such that I won't be able to run A/C if the grid is down (with a soft start it could, probably, but not for long), but we'll manage anything else for a decent amount of time and if a longer outage is expected then we'll just have to be wise about our electric usage at night (like maybe not use the electric wall oven to roast a turkey for 5 hours haha) - I've got 20kWh of batteries (continuous 7.68kW obviously only for a couple hours, but if we only use the well water and some lighting and our fridge & freezer we'll be fine overnight).

 

[ultrarunner]

Sounds like you have planned well.

 

[ning]

Sounds like you have planned well.

We'll see this summer

 

[jk96]

I have a consultation meeting today to go over a solar proposal for our home. We installed 2 - 25kw systems on our business about 8 years ago and has worked great. Current system we are looking at for the home is a 25kw system, ground mount, fronius invertors, canadian solar bifacial panels. On paper the payback looks to be about 8.5 years. Will have to dig into the numbers they used to see how conservative they were in estimating the amount of production. Will be a grid tied system.

 

[ultrarunner]

It's been a couple of years and noticed my 13 year old 6kW array produces the most in February-March each year around noon making 4kW

The 4kW includes home baseline between a quarter and third kW.

My panels at 160W are about 1/2 the output of the current version which are 300W.

Anyone upgrade their older panels?

 

[ning]

It's been a couple of years and noticed my 13 year old 6kW array produces the most in February-March each year around noon making 4kW

The 4kW includes home baseline between a quarter and third kW.

My panels at 160W are about 1/2 the output of the current version which are 300W.

Anyone upgrade their older panels?

Is it temperature sensitivity? I know panels work better when they're not really hot, and airflow around them is important; make sure there's no leaves etc stuck under them if they're on a roof.

Upgrading would be a good idea but don't forget your inverter may need an upgrade too.

 

[ultrarunner]

Is it temperature sensitivity? I know panels work better when they're not really hot, and airflow around them is important; make sure there's no leaves etc stuck under them if they're on a roof.

Upgrading would be a good idea but don't forget your inverter may need an upgrade too.

Sunny Boy 6k investor... panels clean as ground mount...
Temps in 60’s mostly and summer mostly 80’s.

I imagine mixing panels is a no no?