It's All About the Weather

I was sitting at my desk yesterday morning when I got a call from Max from our solar contractor. He said they want to start on our project today... I looked out the window at the torrential rains as I said "as long as you think the weather's going to be OK..." So, here I am, working from home as they've been spending the day putting the panels up.

Unlike some of the companies I talked to, Marin Solar did not want to rip open the ceiling of our room to find the joists. I'm very glad about that, because it would have made the whole thing a lot harder.

At this point, they've just left and I have 18 panels on the ground waiting to go up to the roof, two sections of metal racking where they will sit, and an inverter in a box in The Bunker (our black hole of a guest room). When I told them to put it in there, I didn't promise they'd be able to get it back out again :-)

Tomorrow they should be hooking it all up. We're hoping to be able to drop the conduit from the roof down the old water heater flue and have everything inside the crawlspace, including the inverter. This will be good because it will minimize the number of new holes and paraphernalia in the outside of the house. There's also a certain elegance to it, which I like.

I'm trying to find out how the software works for monitoring the inverter; I'd really like to have it set up to capture the production data when the system is ready to turn on. In fact, I think I'm going to go raid the box now!