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Saturday Morning Home Repair Blog 12-10-22: Going Solar! [1]

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Date: 2022-12-10

Catchin' rays at 5780 ft elevation

Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blogging, where we talk about fixing houses and the things in them that are supposed to work for us. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and gifted amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from readers, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience. Or sometimes, we just gab.

Have an interesting story or project to share? Contact Glen The Plumber about posting it for Saturday Morning Home Repair.

So we finally decided to go solar. Came about in an interesting manner.

Someone from a solar company came to the door. Now we’re always skeptical of door-to-door and phone sales. But we figure what the heck, let’s see what they say. So they gave us a quote, followed by the usual “sign now” crap. Needless to say, we didn’t. Researched the company (Meraki), found out they had a really bad reputation and the system was way overpriced. Got more bids from a couple of locally-based companies and ended up with much higher quality components for about $20K less.

We have 26 Panasonic 330W panels, all controls, and professional installation. 19191Killowatt hours annual production, 112% of last year’s use. Zero down and a payment about $70 less than our average PNM bill.

After a lengthy process including design, PNM approvals, and state building permits, our contractor was finally able to install last week. So here we go:

Preparing the site:

We used to have an RV carport in this space; after we sold the RV, someone offered to buy the carport and hauled it away. There were a number of anchors still in the ground so I cut them off with an angle grinder, then mowed and raked.

The installers arrived and unloaded the components — some of them here:

26 Panasonic panels

Pre-assembled control panel

Starting assembly of the rack. The rack system is anchored by drilling a couple of feet into the ground and installing expansion anchors.

Rack almost done:

Trenching for the cables connecting to our entrance pole. This part was a beast, which I expected having trenched about 80 feet to our additions. Lots of rocks in our ancient riverbed!

First panels going on:

And all done!

Sunny side

Shady side

Controls wired and undergoing testing.

The meter on the right is the contractor’s test meter, left is our original meter. While running the tests, the original meter was running backwards. I turned on the clothes dryer and the meter was barely crawling forward. State inspector approved Tuesday, now just have to wait for PNM to get out here and connect.

In addition to our payment we’ll have a minimum PNM bill of about $10, though it may take until summer to catch up and level out. OTOH, the sun at our elevation is pretty intense year round.

Hope you find this informative. We’re working at the winery this weekend, but I’ll be near the computer until about 11 am MT if you have questions or comments.

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