Solar electric makes sense, even in cloudy NE Ohio!

I've always been interested in sustainable living, as a way to reduce the footprint we have on our environment, as a way to teach the kids about good stewardship, and simply because it makes us less dependent and saves money.  Solar electric had been something my wife and I wanted to try for a long time, but the cost of a system never quite made sense vs the payback.  Especially when you factor in the installation.  Things have gotten much more economical lately, but this is still the snowbelt of the midwest and not Phoenix or California.  So I did what I usually do, set alerts on Craigslist and kept an eye out for the opportunity to buy a system from someone, and in the meantime did a bunch of reading on what it would take to do the install work ourselves.

Two years ago, when we moved to the rural east side of Cleveland, Ohio, we finally got our chance to jump in with both feet.  I found an ad posted by a retiring couple in Morgantown, West Virginia looking to sell an entire 8000 Watt, grid-tied system.  The grid-tie approach greatly simplifies the installation because you are essentially tying into your home electric panel just like adding a new breaker, without the extra work of battery banks, etc.  On the downside, if power goes out on the grid, the inverters will sense the change and shut off flow from the panels to the house (protects if people are working on downed lines), but we really weren't preparing for a zombie apocalypse and the price the WVa couple was asking made it worth our while.

My son and I rented a small trailer, climbed in our minivan and drove a few hours south... and were stunned when we arrived to see the extent of the sustainability conversions this couple had done.  As a neurosurgeon and professor at the local university, their motivations were more philosophical than economical, but they had a list of sustainability improvements that would leave anyone impressed - water reclamation with a massive cistern/filtration system, well-stocked gardens, solar water heating, wood boiler, solar electric system, and probably a list of other things we never got around to seeing.

Check out the awesome central boiler they had in the basement... would've loved to do something with this, if only we had a crane...

The couple was super friendly, telling us a bit of their story to this point and the adventure they were going on next, as they retired to the coast of mexico and no longer needed many of the systems.  Unfortunately, we couldn't talk them out of their brand new Tesla Model S, but we did pick up the system, had some delicious cheesecake, and headed back to Cleveland.

Here's a series of photos showing our progress toward electricity independence, jump-started in large part by this wonderful couple.

After a long days drive, our haul... 41 panels, 3 inverters, racking, and all sorts of wiring...

 

In the garage, I added the two inverters to pick up the ~30 panels from the roof, plus the third to run the 12 panels in the yard.  Later, I found that it was easier to run the back yard panels in to the basement main breaker panel, so I moved the big white inverter inside.

This is almost done, after the change... 

Here's the start of the work in the main electrical panel to make room for the inverter that will be tied to 12 panels planned for the back yard.  I needed to move the alarm system, rearrange all the cable & telephone lines, and install junction box to tie in the new panels and the generator transfer panel.  Around the same time, I stumbled on a good Craigslist buy on a generator transfer panel... we had experienced a bunch of outages in our first few months here, so seemed like a good idea.  As you might guess, the moment I got that generator in place, we've never seen an extended outage since!.

Installed... certainly not done, as there's always something to improve, add, and lots to clean up...

Now up to the roof to install the racking and put up the panels.  This was surprisingly easy, just line up the racks, use roofing tar to prevent leaking where the screws go through the shingles, and screw down.  Getting the panels up and on was a 2 person job, but they went on very easily.  The hardest part really was carrying them up the ladder with my son.

Here you can see where a bank of them sit on the other side of our solar water heating system (wrote about this in another post)

 And then to the backyard, where we built a wood frame and layered the panels in.  This is still a work in progress, as we will be planting trees behind to make it nicer to look at, and I'm putting in a movable angle mechanism to allow for increasing/decreasing the angle to make more effective in the winter.  Someday maybe I will splurge and make a proper metal stand-mounted rack that tracks the sun... but that's way down after the other projects my wife is patiently waiting on!

After all this was done, I was really surprised and a bit frustrated to see our electric meter still spinning!  After staring at it for a while in disbelief, knowing I had almost nothing drawing electricity on, I realized something I didn't know... these older pot meters spin backwards if they are fed from the house side!

Our meter before... 

Our meter after the roof panels got tied in... 

We weren't just saving electricity, we were producing and feeding the grid.  Time to call the utility to get our meter changed out to a new smart meter and get paid!

That's it... took a couple days to get the roof panels up, another day to get the yard panels, and the electrical work was probably another day of work spread out over a couple weekends.  Plus a half day spent in the car to WVa.  Not a bad way to spend time with your son!