Self Installing a 4 kW/h - Solar Photovoltaic System

PWP Check Arrives

Fri, 1 Apr 2011 22:46:37 -0700

No April Fools today. Pasadena Water and Power Solar Rebate check arrived today, just 10 days after sign off. In so many ways, I love this city. I want to take this moment to thank everyone at PWP for all the good info, assistance, and professionalism. Irma, Mauricio, ..... Kudos!

When we did the final install I had changed the solar panels from Sharp 224w to Schott 225w. I also moved one panel from the east facing to the south facing array. This required I resubmit all the solar shading and CSI production calculations for the arrays. It was well worth the effort as it actually resulted in a few hundred dollar increase in the rebate due to increased performance. Very nice.

When I submitted the new paper work, I also included all the receipts for the city permits, equipment, and the electrician. Pasadena PWP is also refunding the total permit costs. They were great and the total number they came up with was exactly what I had calculated. Very very nice.

So that’s it. I’m planning on having a SUNday party to celebrate the end of a long process and the beginning of oil independence! I’m looking forward to sharing more in the future. Please contact me if you have questions or comments. Now go out and install your own, quit reading about it.

Enphase Web Portal

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:46:44 -0700

You can now log into the public site:
http://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/VxzZ15241

Check Daily production, Peak power, Lifetime statistics. All Live.

It’s On!

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:21:02 -0700

It has been almost 5 weeks since the last update. It took the Pasadena Fire Department 10 days to come out and do their inspection. I had been warned it could take a bit, but I would have called as soon as we were close to finishing. No problem with the inspection, but once again, I had to explain about the microinverters.

Building Inspector came 5 days later and failed me for not having a separate breakout box for the PV Disconnect, and I had one less label than required. Make sure to check with the NEC manual and your local power company and your local building codes as they can ALL require different labels. Our system met NEC but Pasadena and PWP have their own requirements. Mainly this big ugly unnecessary frankenstein blade switch.

I had to call Edward at E.G. Electric to come back and rework the system.
Now there are 5 separate physical disconnects from the panel to the meter. Redundant redundancy squared. BTW, Edward was a good sport.

Here is what the final electrical looks like with all the bits and labels:

Testing Day

Wed, 9 Feb 2011 21:10:26 -0800

Well. Today was testing day. As you can see in the image above the system produced approx 3kWh. ( It shows three because production total is averaged up) This was in 40 minutes during the early afternoon. Nice. Very Nice. Had to get Enphase tech support on the phone to get the Envoy monitoring system to see the inverters. I got right through to their support and was helped by a very knowledgeable tech. I was moving the Envoy around the house trying to find the communication signal.

As I think I mentioned before, each of the 18 micro-inverters talks to the Envoy monitoring system using the house electrical lines. Theoretically, you can plug it in anywhere, but closer to the box the better the signal. The Envoy then plugs into your internet connection and reports to the Enphase servers. Enphase then creates a webpage for you, showing your systems stats and performance. (Update: see it here! )

We got it up and running. It was great to see the system count up the communicating micro-inverters, one at a time. When it got to 18 I was mighty relieved. All are working and talking!

Next, I went out to the meter to see what all the folks want to see. It is the solar pv money shot. Your meter running backwards.

Well, it is not as dramatic on a digital meter let me tell you. If you look in the bottom right hand corner you can see 3 black rectangles to the right of kWh. When electricity is flowing in from the grid, the rectangles sequence left to right. Left on, left and center on, left center and right on, center and right on, right on, blank, repeat. It was so exciting to see the sequence of digital rectangles go in reverse!! *smirk*

Ok. But at least I knew it was working. I came back to turn off the Solar and I expected to see the numbers had gone down since we were using very little power in the house. Wrong! It had gone up! Was something wrong?

I took the shot above and went to the web. I looked up this model and lo and behold it counts UP no matter which direction the current is flowing. I just paid to upload 3kWh of power to the grid! Damnation. Ok. no biggie. Now I know to expect PWP to be replacing this even though it is only three years old. I hope they can reuse it.

Overall, a good test. Everything is up and running. Now we are just waiting for the Fire Department to call us back, because nothing can happen until they sign off first.

Near Miss

Mon, 7 Feb 2011 22:25:05 -0800

My 2nd design for our system was based around the Xantrax line of DC/AC Inverters. I just ran across this:

Notice of Inverter Recall
On January 18, 2011, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with Schneider Electric, announced a voluntary recall of selected grid-tied solar inverters sold under the brand names of Xantrax, Sunpower, and General Electric. Information on these inverters are subject to the recall can be found at: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml11/11099.html Consumers should stop using the recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.
We don’t know how the Enphase will hold up, but we’ll see. I would have purchased this inverter and had it recalled before it was installed! Whew!