{"id":2865,"date":"2017-06-01T07:16:55","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T14:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pascual.co\/ActiveE\/?p=2865"},"modified":"2017-06-01T07:16:55","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T14:16:55","slug":"solar-panels-and-inverters-our-first-solar-repair-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pascual.co\/ActiveE\/powerwall\/solar-panels-and-inverters-our-first-solar-repair-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar Panels and Inverters, Our First Solar Repair Experience."},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2012, shortly after moving to electric with our BMW Active E, it became apparent to us that installing a solar array on our roof was going to be beneficial for us\u00a0to lower the cost of our transportation fuel as well as our consumption of energy at home. \u00a0Producing our own fuel coupled with net metering and time of use would provide us with efficiency that would provide for a rather quick payback.<\/p>\n

As I understand it, Net Metering<\/em> allows utility customers with the ability to export the power generated by their devices (in our case, our solar panels) to the utility at the retail rate of energy as a credit against our overall consumption. \u00a0Time of Use<\/em> is a program that provides differing pricing for electricity depending on the time of day and week that energy is consumed by a utility customer. \u00a0When we first started on this program, our peak times for energy mapped perfectly with the hours of sunlight. \u00a0That is to say, the peak energy times were from Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm. \u00a0This meant that during the the times that we were not at home, our solar panels would produce enough credit to be offset during our primary usage, which is after 6pm and before 10am (in SCE territory, since we installed our panels, this peak time has changed and shifted to 2pm to 8pm). \u00a0Under our original assumptions, and armed with a single EV that was capable of an 80-100 mile range, we figured our break-even for this project to be in the approximately six to seven years. \u00a0As many long-time readers have found out, it was soon after getting into our BMW Active E that we dedicated ourselves to a primarily EV existence that we went from one EV to three EVs and back down to two EVs. \u00a0With the amount of driving that both my wife and I did, this break-even point was reached sometime last year (around the three and a half to four year mark.)<\/p>\n

When we first bid out our homes’ solar PV, we shopped it around and ended up with Solar City. \u00a0As I’ve documented before, because there was a snag in the age of our roof, we had the opportunity to re-open this to others and ended up with Real Goods Solar (RGS Energy). \u00a0We documented all this in some articles on this blog<\/a>. \u00a0I did a follow up that covered the installation<\/a>. \u00a0Because of how things worked out for us, we opted to pre-pay our power purchase agreement with Real Goods Solar for the 20 years of service that we signed up for, if we do this again now, we would buy the system instead, but I didn’t want to have to worry about maintenance and the like.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the subject of inverters. \u00a0As I understand it, the inverter is the device that converts the Direct Current (DC) produced by our solar panels into AC (Alternating Current) energy that our appliances and other domestic household devices uses. Every solar company that I spoke to during the bid process basically said that the main thing that would break in a solar installation is the inverter. \u00a0 Under original solar installation designs, solar installations would have ONE or TWO inverters that connect the whole system to the home and electrical grid. This means that if the inverter failed, the energy produced by the solar panels would not be converted to AC power and be\u00a0effectively out of service for the whole system until it gets repaired. \u00a0We picked Real Goods Solar primarily for financial reasons. \u00a0However, at the time, they pitched an interesting system using micro-inverters. \u00a0Instead of one (or a primary and backup) inverter situation for the house, each solar panel\u00a0has its own inverter that converts the energy produced by each panel to AC. \u00a0This configuration spread the risk of outage from the whole system to just a single panel at a time. \u00a0Being a systems guy and understanding single points of failure versus minimizing this, I appreciated the pitch, but money savings really drove the decision.<\/p>\n

One of the technical benefits we got from having the micro-inverter solution is we are able to see the production of our solar system down to the panel level.<\/p>\n

So, on a normal day, we can see the panel production on either the website on a browser:<\/p>\n

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