Saturday Morning Home Repair Blog 12-10-22: Going Solar!

Welcome all over again to Saturday Early morning Home Mend blogging, wherever we communicate about correcting homes and the factors in them that are meant to operate for us. An ad hoc cadre of setting up experts and gifted amateurs attempt to response issues that occur from viewers, and offer encouragement and tips for individuals inclined to do items for by themselves, if they can. We all do a whole lot of matters, collectively, and can possibly assist out with insights from our wide expertise. Or in some cases, we just gab.

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So we ultimately decided to go photo voltaic.  Came about in an appealing fashion.

Anyone from a photo voltaic company came to the door.  Now we’re generally skeptical of door-to-door and cellular phone income.  But we determine what the heck, let us see what they say.  So they gave us a estimate, followed by the usual “sign now” crap. Useless to say, we didn’t.  Researched the company (Meraki), identified out they had a truly lousy track record and the system was way overpriced.  Obtained more bids from a few of locally-based businesses and ended up with substantially higher high quality factors for about $20K considerably less. 

We have 26 Panasonic 330W panels, all controls, and experienced set up.  19191Killowatt hours annual output, 112% of final year’s use.  Zero down and a payment about $70 much less than our ordinary PNM bill.

Soon after a lengthy system which includes structure, PNM approvals, and state creating permits, our contractor was finally equipped to install very last week.  So right here we go:

Getting ready the web-site:

We utilised to have an RV carport in this room right after we marketed the RV, someone available to obtain the carport and hauled it away.  There ended up a amount of anchors however in the ground so I reduce them off with an angle grinder, then mowed and raked.

The installers arrived and unloaded the factors — some of them in this article:

Beginning assembly of the rack.  The rack method is anchored by drilling a couple of feet into the floor and installing expansion anchors.

Rack virtually accomplished:

Trenching for the cables connecting to our entrance pole.  This component was a beast, which I envisioned owning trenched about 80 ft to our additions.  A lot of rocks in our ancient riverbed!

First panels likely on:

And all completed!

Controls wired and undergoing tests.

The meter on the suitable is the contractor’s check meter, remaining is our initial meter.  Although jogging the assessments, the original meter was functioning backwards.  I turned on the dresses dryer and the meter was hardly crawling ahead.  Point out inspector approved Tuesday, now just have to hold out for PNM to get out here and connect.

In addition to our payment we’ll have a bare minimum PNM monthly bill of about $10, nevertheless it may perhaps just take till summer to catch up and level out. OTOH, the sun at our elevation is quite rigorous year spherical.

Hope you come across this enlightening.  We’re functioning at the vineyard this weekend, but I’ll be around the computer system until eventually about 11 am MT if you have queries or responses.