Solar Power: Day 5

Captain’s Log, November 3, 2022: If Engineering doesn’t come up with a better sound for an oscillator I’m jumping into an escape pod and self destructing my ship.

In short, today was crazy. I got word from my solar installer that they wanted to send a crew to my house to get up on the roof and take exact measurements for panel placement. All told I think we had about ten people at my house between the two crews. Thankfully nobody was in danger of stepping on the other’s toes, figuratively or literally. But between answering the odd question from the pergola crew and answering a LOT of questions with the solar crew, I think I walked about five miles without leaving home … or at least that’s what my feet are telling me. I’m not about to argue with them.

I’ll start this post with the pergola updates first since that will be nice and simple. Jim Carrey came back to voice the Milwaukee multi-tool again, but because I basically spent the whole day outside I got a front-row seat to his latest voicework. But, as promised, here are pics of the beams.

Insert subtitle for that iconic sound bite in Dumb and Dumber

Three heavily notched beams down, one to go

While the crew did finish milling the beams before the end of the day, they needed one more person to operate their bobcat, plus there wasn’t enough time left in the day to start raising the beams anyway. No biggie to me, a job worth doing is a job worth doing right and getting it right the first time, not the second or third. Slow, steady, and methodical is what’s going to win this race.

When the solar crew showed up, coincidentally I was returning home from dropping my dogs off at daycare right as they started arriving. I had to raise an eyebrow when I introduced myself and then they asked my engineering background. Turns out they thought I was another engineer from the solar installer and not the homeowner. After a good laugh and then looks of excitement on their faces when they realized they were working with a kindred spirit we convened a meeting with tape measures and printouts.

Naturally this was when the surprises started happening. The first two were on their end. The office didn’t give them a printout of the panel mapping based on the correct solar panel dimensions (this was the result of a selection change due to panel availability) and the office also didn’t account for two skylights and a flue vent on my roof that I personally know they were made aware of. The third surprise was on my end. I did not know that a fire code existed requiring eighteen inches of clearance on all sides of an array (not to be confused with spacing between panels). The crew and I spent somewhere between two and three hours measuring the roof sections and figuring out how to jigsaw twenty four solar panels on my highly complex roof when we encountered our first mutual surprise. This one was cutting down a few trees on the west side of my house.

The original hope for all of us was that we would be able to mount the panels exclusively on the south face of my roof and the pergola, allowing for maximum power generation. Additionally there are no trees anywhere close to my house, let alone my roof, on the south side because the property slopes downward in that direction. However we do have a few trees on the west side that frame the house nicely. Thankfully the installer was as interested as we were in maintaining pleasing aesthetics (after all, it wouldn’t be very good for the residential solar industry if the installations made houses unattractive). They pointed out three trees that at least were shading the roof, one of which was both dead and would create shade for roughly the last third of daylight in the day, another that shaded only the corner of the roof when we were looking at it, and a third tree that was the biggest, but also the most visible from the front of the house. In the end we opted to only have the dead tree taken down, which will happen either tomorrow or Monday next week depending on what they decide to prioritize.

The solar crew was really split between two major tasks - roof survey, and electrical inspection and installation. Per code (I’m told) for a grid-tied solar array the trunk lines need to tie in directly next to the meter box instead of my main service panel. Basically this translated to the installation of two disconnect boxes on the outside of my house right next to the meter, and the addition of wires inside the main disconnect for the house immediately behind the meter which was inside my garage. Having to tie in here also works out much easier for the installers because both the meter and main disconnect are at ground level, while my main panel is in the basement roughly thirty feet from the meter and beyond the concrete bunker known as my woodshop. I’ll try to get a picture of this tomorrow. There’s always something I miss photographing when I’m outside.

Lastly the solar crew started attaching anchor brackets to the west roof. The rails for the solar panels will be bolted to these.

Both crews are returning bright and early tomorrow, which is really today at the time of writing this, so I should get to bed. Can’t afford to be a zombie.