thirteen. it has taken thirteen posts! but there it is: the beginnings of a power plant. a heroic effort over the weekend (with a little help from me) saw the roof finally go on the shed, which was of course the most important condition to getting the panels up.
as scheduled – or actually: re-scheduled (twice, too) – the solar installers turned up this morning and very quickly got stuck into it. about half an hour later, while some of the guys were still unloading, a bunch of little l-brackets had sprung up on the roof, and just a little later rows of cool black anodised aluminium profiles connected to those.
enough structure to carry three rows of solar panels, 21 panels each. that’s 315 watts of power times 63 … which makes 19,845 watts in total, and there is still space for another row if we ever feel the need to add a bit more capacity. that would then take the total to a whopping 26,460 watts. the actual output will of course vary based on the angle of the sun (the azimuth) as well as whether or not there is cloud cover. we should find out pretty soon what that all looks like: the inverters capture a lot of data that can be analysed – stay tuned!
the guys then installed the cabling up to the end of the row, to the isolator boxes. there is an isolator for every half row, with ten or eleven panels, connecting to those in series. next the panels started to fly up. it didn’t take long at all, with five guys who had clearly done this before.
they also drilled a few holes in the new roof! i guess the cables have to get in somehow, but it’s still unnerving. looking at the setup now i think we got the size of the shed just right. the panels fit perfectly and there is a walking space to provide access to the panels should there ever be a problem.
it looks good, too, right? tomorrow the electricians will be back to install the inverters and the battery. we may not be much more than half a day away from the power plant we have been waiting for.
in the meantime the peters were going hard, too, and they are almost done. almost: all the flashing around the doors is complete, and they would have finished the roof as well if it hadn’t turned out the profiles for the long edge were the wrong size.
it’s never easy.