Adding Solar, Part 3: Installation

I've documented the research and proposal phases of our residential solar power project here and here. After a long spell of bad weather, and my being out of town for two weeks, EcoHouse Solar began installing our photovoltaic system on April 15, 2015.

Their first step, after unloading gear, was to place the mounting brackets on the roof.

This is what the brackets look like.

By the end of the day, all the mounting brackets were up and the rails attached. Two brackets were placed too close to the shading tree, and were removed later.

The twelve solar panels and Enphase microinverters were stored in our garage for the next day.

This is one side of a microinverter.

Thursday the 16th had one-tenth of an inch of rain, not a day to be up on the roof. EcoHouse Solar came out on the 17th to mount and wire the panels and microinverters.

Joan and I left about noon for a weekend at the Arc of Appalachia annual Wildflower Pilgrimage. We chatted with the EcoSolar guys as we closed up the house, and learned that they were also familiar with the Arc. This turned out to be meaningful ...

On Saturday we participated in the Ohio River Bluffs hike, with the blessings of fair weather and peak blooms, especially of Virginia Bluebells, Dwarf Larkspur, and Blue-eyed Mary. When we returned to the Forest Museum for dinner and the evening program, there was a message for us at the front desk. From Kevin of EcoHouse Solar. Please call him back. Uh-oh.

I called him back. A spool of heavy grounding wire had gotten away from them, bounced off the trellis for the trumpet vines, and smacked into the outside faucet on that side of the house. Something you could not do if you tried. They thought they had heard water inside the house, and called the Reynoldsburg Water Department to turn off the water to the house. Kevin had arranged for a plumber to show up at 3pm Sunday. There was nothing to be done right away, but it was a restless sleep that night.

Joan and I were able to attend the breakfast, ceremonies, and part of a hike on Sunday before heading back, and it had started raining, so we were thankful that it was Sunday and not Saturday that had been shortened. We arrived home and saw that Kevin had left two jugs of distilled water for us on the front porch.

Dashing down to the (unfinished) basement, we encountered a scene that wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been. First off, the pipe hadn't snapped and produced a gusher. The seal of the fitting had, however, been broken, and sprayed water until the house supply was shut off.

Nearby boxes and insulation had been sprayed, but nothing important was damaged. The water had accumulated and flowed out across the concrete floor, absorbed along the way by cardboard boxes, old rug fragments, two pieces of foam, and the like. The tide reached only a fraction of the basement, and our losses were confined to several old cardboard boxes and some insulation. The cardboard boxes were pitched, and the rug fragments hung out to dry.

The plumber didn't show up at 3pm. At 4pm I called Kevin, who called the plumbing company, Water Works. To make a long story short, it turns out that the plumber had an arrival window, starting at 3pm, and arrived just after 8pm, the we'll-go-to-a-motel cutoff time Joan and I had agreed upon. A very friendly and capable young man replaced the faucet with a Woodford freezeless model including anti-siphon; neither feature belonged to the old faucet.

He also put in a shutoff valve and was able to turn our water back on, after struggling with the street valve, hidden underneath a bush. All this on a windy, rainy night. Thank you! No motel for us.

I will also give credit to the Reynoldsburg Water Department, which Kevin said came out quickly when he reported the leak. They were also willing to come out and turn on the water Sunday night if the plumber couldn't manage it, and that's service!

By Tuesday it was time for connecting the panels, on the south side of the house, to the electrical breaker, on the north side of the house. The attic only runs partway. In this photo, the flexible conduit containing the wires comes in from the roof.

It snakes along the attic to the furthest spot where it can take a straight shot down the outside wall.

Down through the soffit,

and the back of the house.

Then into the basement for a run along the joists to the north wall.

Once the wires had been run, the electrician spent half of Wednesday the 22nd installing the new electrical complex around the breaker box.

The solar power comes in from the upper left of the photo, into a manual disconnect box. From there it travels into a "revenue-grade" meter,

required for reporting production when applying for an SREC (Solar Renewable Energy Credit). Then it goes to the outside of the house, where there is another manual disconnect box, on the right with the red sticker,

and finally into the breaker box, from whence it can flow into the house or out onto the grid.

Note: if the utility power goes out, the microinverters automatically disconnect, for the safety of repair personnel.  Also, the microinverters require the external power to synchronize the phases of their AC current with the grid's phases. To have power during an outage, batteries or a generator are required.

At lower left in the earlier photo is an Enphase Envoy, which collects data from the twelve microinverters and sends it, via the Internet, to Enphase. At the Enphase website the installer and the owner can look at power production, per-panel statistics, and other geek-out goodies. The face of the Envoy also reports some statistics:

The WiFi signal at the Envoy location, I had discovered earlier, was poor. I created an Internet connection to the Envoy from the router at the far side of the house using MoCA, the Multimedia over Coaxial Alliance standard. MoCA adapters communicate over the house coaxial using frequencies that the cable company doesn't. Here, one adapter is plugged into the coaxial and into an Ethernet port on the router.

One floor below on the far side of the house, another adapter sits, connected to the coaxial and translating that back into Ethernet. The Ethernet cable sneaks down into the basement through a hole in the bottom of a cabinet!

On Thursday, April 23rd, the Reynoldsburg inspector came out to review the electrical and structural work. Vivian was thorough and went up on the roof with the EcoHouse guys, which she called her second worst (steepest) roof, the first-worst being a silo. There were two minor points to fix and have re-inspected, but it was OK to turn on the juice. The EcoHouse team put the final panel on the roof -- it had been left off to give Vivian the ability to see the mounting sytem -- and, it being a sunny day, by 12:30 our meter was spinning backwards.

On April 30th AEP-Ohio came out to replace the old analog meter with a new digital meter that records power-from-the-grid and power-to-the-grid separately.

On May 6th I received the signed AEP-Ohio "OAD - Net Energy Metering Service Application" in the mail, and Kevin came by to deliver more materials and information, and to settle up the remaining installation bill.

Now, it's time to see how power production works out through the various changes of the year: longer days vs. shorter days, leaves vs. no leaves, high sun vs. low sun, clear weather vs. cloudy. My hope is that at least 3600 kilowatt-hours will be generated each year. We'll see!