DIY Solar Install Photos and Writeup

By
Dave
Published: December 4, 2009Posted in: Installation Projects

Things that went right and things that go wrong on a DIY solar install.

solar-power-diagram-micro-inverters

Above is Joe’s online system (not all panels shown) from his micro-inverters.

solar-panels-diy-roof

solar-panels-diy-rack

I got an email from a SolarDave visitor telling me about his DIY solar install. I wrote him back and asked him if he wanted to share photos and any stories about things that worked and things that went wrong and he was kind of enough to share below (Thanks Joe!):

Hi Dave,

I only had one or two snafus along the way. The best advice is to plan ahead and research every step, including checking out your vendors. I had one vendor in Southern California who never shipped the items I ordered, and I had to send my credit card company after him. I didn’t lose money, but did waste almost eight weeks while he sent me nothing but excuses and lies. I can provide the name of the company that tried to rip me off, but I have already reported him to the BBB so he has at least one mark against him that people can research.

In California, the power company administers the rebate program and approves you for interconnection. In my opinion, this is a case of the wolf guarding the henhouse. True to form, PG&E dragged its feet on the interconnection application and the underlying message from them was: we will find any way possible to prevent you from turning your system on. Ultimately, they gave in and let me interconnect, but I am still waiting for the rebate check to show up, which the public utilities commission allows them 60 days to process. We’re coming up on 30 days without any communication following the acknowledgement of receipt of the rebate request form.

There’s no substitute for good planning. I had sourced most of the parts and priced them long before I placed orders. I had even gone in and mapped the rafter system in my house – which is irregular due to the house being built in stages and added on over its lifetime. I planned where each stanchion would be placed so as to distribute the weight better across all the rafters, and I followed my plans. In designing the system, I planned for expansion and “built in” some of the things I would need for expansion, like including extra lengths of ground wire that will eventually be connected to the panels and inverters in the next phase of the project, and leaving enough racking extending past the existing panels to extend it without disrupting the existing panels.

PG&E made a huge fuss about access to my system in case they might need to shut it off. Since their meter readers and repair personnel have had no problem accessing my home (there is a security gate at the main road that they have a code to open) in the decade I have lived here, I figured they already had sufficient access, but they tried to claim that they needed extraordinary access and couldn’t rely on “normal” means to get in. One manager even told me they would need to shut my system off 24×7 – even suggesting to me that at 3:00am, it might somehow be producing power and therefore would potentially be a danger to the repair personnel trying to restore power to the lines during an outage. I didn’t bother to point out that the inverters I use are approved by the power company itself and include anti-islanding technology, not to mention the whole point that at 3:00am, solar generators don’t tend to produce any electricity. Clearly, they were just trying to flex their muscles.

I did all the work myself, including muscling the panels up onto the roof one by one. I had a scaffold that I built for painting the house which helped a lot, but am told that it’s okay to edge-carry panels for a short period of time, such as when ascending a ladder. Since I had nobody else present to rush me to the hospital in case I should fall, I played it safe. There wasn’t anything truly difficult about the installation, and once I had worked all the details out in my head, it really went very smoothly.

The first power bill that arrived after I was interconnected was quickly replaced by a new bill, in which PG&E managed to find a way to charge me more for the same power I had used – but it also included a refund mandated by the State to cover a situation in which PG&E had overcharged the customers and was forced to refund the overcharge. I’ve been interconnected less than a month, but already, the savings are adding up!

~Joe

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