I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack.
We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells.
Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads.
We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually.
It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
You’re in a good part of the country for grid power. I’m in Georgia where the typical rate is about 14 cents but summer rates are more like 18. Summer rates aren’t captured in this EIA chart but you can see the whole country. With summer rates and high energy use for cooling and dehumidification it’s a 7-8 year payback for a 13kW DC/10kW AC system.
I’m in a mountain town in BC Canada and pay $0.13/kWh. My 7.8kW solar system cost me $0 out of pocket after incentives and an interest free loan.
It’s making ~$1000 per year of electricity, so we’ll just put that onto the loan for the next 8 years instead of paying it to the power company. Then for ~25 years after that it will make me $1000/year. Free money.
(The price of electricity is already pre-approved to increase 5% a year, so actually my savings will be more every year than the year before)
I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric rate. It's funny though...
> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
How has your experience been with the lithium-titanium-oxide batteries? Everything I read makes it sound like the optimal solution for safety and long life, but it doesn't seem like they have displaced other battery chemistries very much.
What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane?
I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.
> those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery
Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town.
My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up.
The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer.
The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the generator only ran when there was a big power need like running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop.
Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it, which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights.
They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things you had to keep doing over and over again.
After a hurricane, the plan might be to help neighbors charge their phones, or sell electricity to telcos to power their networks switches and cell towers.
I think I am much less remote than the poster, and I can easily lose power for a week or more after a winter storm. Considering that they already have generators on site that can manage the full load, they probably have much better up time than the utility electricity provider.
All underground infrastructure or in concrete utility huts. Powerplant is concrete, no flooding issues due to excellent drainage of the area.
We can run on generator to charge the batteries for about 2 weeks on the fuel we keep. Other than that, we rebuild what isn’t broken and later buy more panels. Most of our mounts should be good to about 150mph, but trees also fly so?
Good news is we can buy panels here about $120 for a 500 watt panel.
Also we have some geographic protection from the full brunt of a storm , as we are in a mountainous eddy zone that typically sees about 30 percent of the coastal and mountaintop wind speed when a cyclone passes nearby as they frequently do.
For the US, the entire user base helps subsidize rural customers. I have recently had the thought that I'm curious how this subsidy compares to the price of creating local micro-grids for rural communities. Especially in places like California where it is long distance power lines running to rural communities that have started several major fires.
I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least the smallest and most remote communities.
It grew organically so there was never a huge cost
Really, except when we decided to build a building for
The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
Is there any documentation of your solar microgrid systems for learning purposes? Or better can anyone visit your farm for learning the microgrid systems?
I just found these article back in 2017 and 2022 on microgrid installation in the Caribbean and they looks like promising off-grid solutions for tropical islands [1],[2].
[1] Why Solar Microgrids May Fall Short in Replacing the Caribbean’s Devastated Power Systems (2017):
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles.
It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.
reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious [solar power setup], the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”"
Need more power:
Buy more panels, they are cheap!
Need more power:
Buy more panels, they are cheap!
Need more power:
Buy more panels, they are cheap!
Need more power:
Can’t buy more panels, need more batteries to stabilize the system. Thankfully , batteries are getting better and cheaper! Lots of power, so much we need to find new ways to benefit from it!
Need more power:
Buy more panels, they are cheap!
……
The economics of panels are basically 20 percent APR here over 20 years. Over 40 years it drops to around 10 percent for out of service life panels.
I don’t have much in the way of links, but I can give you an overview.
We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.
This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered.
The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water.
We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility.
There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use.
The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol.
Also, yeah, I know. Wordpress wasn’t a great choice even years ago when I set up the blog, but I was going to self host as a static site “soon” anyway and I needed to get started… almost good enough is the mortal enemy of adequate.
Very interesting. I'm looking to do something very similar on a farm.
Would you mind sharing some more design details?
Questions that come to mind: What products are you using? Are you doing any AC-coupling between inverters? If not, are you just running your PV wires between buildings? Are you stepping up your AC voltages to 480v or so to cover greater distances with less loss? Thanks!
Running the inverters in parallel synchronized in a three phase configuration, 2 per phase, 224/130. Since the power plant is centrally located, our longest run is about 270m. It’s at the edge of what we can do with the cable we have buried, so if we need to extend or add significantly more capacity we will probably go up to 440v for that segment, with a substation at the PED4 utility hut. Better efficiency in step up/step down is one of the reasons we chose 3 phase power.
The panels are mostly centralized with each string being a home-run to the power plant but we are building out an additional 10KW on a rooftop about 200 yards away, so that will be 600VDC buried cable.
We are testing small ( panel-back attached )grid-tie inverters for supplemental power at point of use, but we will see how much we can add before it results in stability issues. It would be great to be able to put a panel or two wherever it’s handy and just tie each panel separately into the ac distribution.
Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power.
Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of that.
As a parallel answer, for small systems this can make sense, although in anything larger than a single small cabin or small boat it probably is borderline these days. Modern inverters are quite efficient, and DC distribution carries a lot of issues, and gets downright dangerous at higher voltages necessary for large appliances.
20 years or so ago I rebuilt a 60’ schooner, and even on that scale AC was by far the best choice. Just the wiring for a DC system was more expensive then double
Refund inverters, and most of the appliances were actually less efficient, since they had their own inverters inside them (DC-DC converters). In all there just wasn’t any justification, and corrosion is another issue on boats, so we went all AC.
To be clear, we are distributing power over about 600m of length, so it has to be high voltage. HVDC is very very dangerous, I would not want it in my house. Not only that, it’s hard to find things that are efficient and work on high voltage DC. Since our batteries are already 60V, our inverters already are very efficient, it’s simply not worth it. Panels are so cheap, it almost doesn’t matter how you are trying to save power, the answer is that it’s almost always cheaper just to buy more panels.
I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter. Just have one AC-DC converter per building.
I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that would be good for all devices.
There are probably safety reasons why this future might be difficult.
I'm not an electrical specialist but there are three major reasons I'm aware of that AC "won" at normal household/commercial power levels:
1. Switching. If you go look at your favorite part supplier you can find a bunch of switches that are rated to switch 250 volts AC and pass 16 amps, enough for basically any standard household outlet anywhere in the world. Those same switches are only rated for 24 volts DC. Why? Because of arcing. AC voltage passes through zero twice a cycle, which means that any arc that may be formed will self-extinguish within a hundredth of a second. DC doesn't do that, so the arc potential has to be limited either by reducing the voltage or increasing the size/complexity/cost of the switch/relay/contactor itself. This also applies to any connectors that may be unplugged under power like wall outlets. If you want to do the same amount of work with DC as you do with AC you basically get the choice between doing it at lower voltage with thick expensive wires or doing it at higher voltage with expensive switches, relays, outlets, etc.
2. Motors. Synchronous AC motors are EVERYWHERE. They're simple, cheap, efficient, and as long as they're not overloaded they run at a consistent speed determined by the number of magnetic poles in the motor and the AC frequency. If you have an appliance or power tool that runs on mains power and does not offer motor speed control (or only offers two or three speed settings) it's likely one of these. Native DC motors are also cheap and simple but but have very different performance characteristics, no native mechanism for precise speed control, and flow current through the rotor which requires brushed contacts that wear out over time. "Brushless DC" motors are actually AC motors paired with a controller which is more or less a DC->AC inverter, adding cost and complexity that may not be otherwise necessary or beneficial to the application.
3. Voltage conversion. AC can use simple wound transformers to efficiently trade voltage for current or vice versa using nothing but wire and metal. You might have used or even built one in a middle-school era science class. DC voltage conversion on the other hand, the simple methods are inefficient and the efficient methods require high-frequency electronics which only became inexpensive enough to go mainstream in the last 50ish years.
None of these are insurmountable problems of course, especially these days when switch-mode power supplies, inverters, VFDs, etc. are cheaper than ever but they still make things more complicated and require going against in some cases multiple lifetimes of industry inertia to purchase equipment produced in much lower volumes which means higher costs, and especially for home applications where size and weight are not the biggest deals it can often be easier/cheaper to just run a larger solar/battery setup to counteract the efficiency losses.
In the RV and boat worlds where size and weight matter you'll find a lot more DC appliances, but those are also generally smaller capacity than a household equivalent.
It is enormously satisfying to be doing something that is so useful to people close to you. I just wish I could focus more on that instead of other projects, but c’est la vie.
I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october.
I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600)
It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or £1 a kwhr)
I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and have solar, and optimise for cost.
If your electrical installation allows it: You can connect your ev plug before the battery so that it does not drain the battery. You can do this by placing the fuse/connection before the measurement clamps for the battery. Somewhere in between your mains connection and your battery/solar system.
This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV.
That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from your battery :)
The ideal solution is for the battery to have a third set of clamps to measure the EV. But as I don't have installer access to the software (centrally managed for the win) I'm not sure thats possible.
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
Would be interesting to know how London compare to Sweden. Electricity here are generally about twice to four times more expensive during the winter than during the summer, and energy consumption is about twice the amount during winter compared to summer. On average people here spend around 75% of the total energy bill during winter.
has some historic prices. We still use gas for heating, so there isn't so much seasonality for consumption. (there is, but not in the same way).
What does affect price is wind. you can see in december there were both record high prices and record low. The more wind we have the cheap power becomes. so in winter its generally quite cheap, but then also it can flip and become very expensive, because gas imports are expensive.
Midnight Solar are the OG company in off grid and they have a "waste not" feature from way back that triggers any device when the parameters you set are reached, ie: float voltage, and/or other things, like a second set point where power would be sent to a third load, like the grid or water heating.
https://www.midnitesolar.com/
hard core techies, even had the pleasure of detailing my inadvertant and unsucessfull attempts to melt one of there controlers.......literaly had a main lug get loose, and the panels arc melted the lug to slag, and it lived.
in any case, there web site has a wealth of info on what is possible, and to look for elsewhere
We have https://www.myenergi.com/ for our car charger and it seems to be able to integrate batteries, charging and panels like you suggest, only you have to go all in. We have parts of it and are tempted to use more, but the lock-in angle is a bit off-putting
Yeah I have a Zappi, but as you know its got no local API, and it doesn't like getting warm. However it _cant_ control my battery directly, because its made by tesla. (I mean thats also my fault....)
I have also heard that if you go all in it works much better. It does have the nice feature of diverting to other devices instead of the grid, and giving priority to certain devices.
If your rates can go negative you should be charging the car and house batteries at that time if possible and then selling back to the grid at peak times. Does your home assistant get real-time rate data and can it facilitate that?
I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are wired up to the grid.
Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc.
So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding:
Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year.
The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
It's kind of telling/ironic that the author gripes (whether rightfully or wrongly) about PG&E wanting more return on investment due to their risk of doing business in California, but when the author decides to build their own power system to not deal with PG&E, literally almost every paragraph related to their planning/setup contains a mention of some different California/city regulation that the author had to meet or else it's illegal for them to build their own power system. To the point where they had to pay a professional to help them meet all the regulations.
We rebuilt our house in the SF Bay Area in 2022 and went fully electric, no gas line anymore. It was really sad that I couldn't resuse any of my previous 12 kwh solar panels that were fully functioning and had another 10-15 years on them as they wouldn't match the new regulations.
I tried to get them installed on a separate area in my own backyard for off-the-grid charger just for my car, but you are not allowed to have a big off-the-grid system unconnected to PG&E. No electrician was willing to help with risk of losing license. The author was lucky that his dad could help with electrical.
Due to similar issues, I couldn't find anyone to take them for free as well. Demo dad was a truly sad day to watch these perfectly functioning solar panels being destroyed by a crane.
Wow, not being able to have an off-grid system AT ALL without the utility's approval just sounds bonkers to me. I guess PG&E is even more evil than I thought.
Used solar panels are a pretty brisk business right now. Lots of places are replacing their 10-15 year-old panels with new ones just due to the better efficiency and capacity alone. And now that we have over a decade of large-scale solar experience to draw from, we are finding that they tend to degrade a lot slower than expected and that the original 30-year lifespan was highly conservative. I'm surprised you couldn't find someone from out of state to buy them.
I was reading something the other day about an interesting dichotomy in California. It’s one of the most heavily regulated states, yet also one of the most lawless at the same time.
> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k.
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
Batteries are dropping fast in price, but for the USA, they might be going up because of tariffs. Neatly sidestepping that:
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as there is a shortage of people able to go through the racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to do with skill.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
I see 7k€ for 12kWp, retail, for a diy ground install set for our summer house. That's before 4k€ in subsidies. No net metering, and feedin compensation is capped at 0.02€/kWh. But at 3k€ net, who cares? Even with the low electricity rates here, this makes sense. Even for a summer house!
In my town in NY state USA, they require a stamped engineering drawing for a ground mount system and it has to be rated for wind and snow load. Most of the ground mounts which come with stamped drawings have run about $1/W total cost which will meet my local needs for a set of panels in the 5kW to 20kW size range. This cost includes concrete, all support structure, and the racking that the panels attach to. This cost does not include panels, wiring, nor inverter.
If you're able to get a 12kW rated full system, including racking, panels, and inverter for the equivalent of $1/W that's an amazing deal! I wish prices here were like that.
I posted above about the price because when we've gotten quotes – and this is over a year back – they were really high! Not sure what the deal is because the graphs all show the cost of green electricity cratering; but somehow on the residential side of things here in the U.S – even in rural areas with very relaxed restrictions – it's super pricey!
For comparison, my 10 kW solar install completed last week cost 24k CAD (15k EUR). That's just panels, inverters and installation. The incremental cost was likely in part due to the ~160% tariffs on solar panels imposed by the Canadian government, but not all.
Ouch. My 7.8kW system fully installed was 13k CAD ( a bunch was DIY)
Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950. Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat pump, elec hot water) was $1000.
Costs are also high for solar installers in the US. It is a relatively dangerous job (on par with roofers) which makes health insurance premiums unaffordable. The permitting process is also quite onerous in a great many localities, involving multiple parties (your installer, the HOA, the city, the county, the power company) and multiple inspections. US installers also tend to provide generous warranty plans, 15 years parts and labor is typical, and have to make sure they have the capital to honor them. This is especially a problem as some solar hardware manufacturers have had some serious quality control issues, especially on the inverters, and have resulted in quite a lot more warranty work than was initially expected.
The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started their own installer business. Many of those businesses were poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by every other installer that they will not work on someone else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it will result in their warranty being voided.
Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But making things easier to plug together helps. And of course component cost is coming down.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
Wow, what a fantastic write-up—thanks for sharing this! I’m a San Jose homeowner (and PG&E sufferer) with a homelab that pulls over 1 kW, and I’ve been down the DIY solar rabbit hole for the past two weeks. Based on my research, I’m planning a roughly 9 kW Signature Solar setup:
18 U server rack (~$500)
— total hardware ~$14 760
My big hang-up has been the rooftop work, permitting and inspections—almost no one I call will touch a true DIY system. If anyone here in the Bay Area has recommendations for installers or back-of-house permit-whisperers who’ll partner on a non-Tesla/Sunrun job, I’d love to hear how you made it happen. Thanks again for the inspiring guide!
Greenlancer will draw up code-compliant plans that you can submit to your local building permit agency, and they'll revise if anything needs it. It cost less than $400 last year. You've done enough research that they'll be able to easily take your project and turn it into something legal.
I recently did an Enphase system of a similar size to yours. It was fully DIY except for wiring the combiner and a roofing company to plug all the holes I drilled. Working with PG&E was truly an epic year-plus battle culminating in a CPUC complaint, but in the end it was really just a bunch of emails.
I don't have any installer recommendations, but it should be easy enough to find a local electrician, and I've found that they tend to know others in adjacent fields.
Thanks so much for sharing your story – hearing about your DIY Enphase install (and epic PG&E battle!) really gives me confidence. And the information you shared is extremely helpful for first-time DIYers like me.
Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution level (i.e. in the local area). Over here the national grid largely operates at or over capacity, which is a very serious problem for the immediate future, especially as more and more power is drained by compute-heavy infrastructure (data centers and such). Distributed generation is an attractive solution for households regardless of which angle you look at it from.
No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude less power from PV than in the summer.
I personally feel there should be more allowance for small personal wind generators in sub-urban areas. That would offset a bit at least in winter for places like the UK. Not sure what the actual laws are, but I can assume councils wont be too happy about someone putting one up on their home.
Love to see housing developments, rather than just adding an overbearing HOA, would instead consider neighborhood power grids (and perhaps a collective ISP while we're wishing for things).
One of those areas where policy action is desperately needed but no attention is paid due to media dysfunction. I think the UK would benefit from region-specific pricing, to move the datacenters closer to generation rather than urban environments. It would also encourage more embedded generation in expensive areas.
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We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells.
Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads.
We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually.
It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
(The price of electricity is already pre-approved to increase 5% a year, so actually my savings will be more every year than the year before)
Solar can be worth it even when power is cheap.
> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.
Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town.
My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up.
The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer.
The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the generator only ran when there was a big power need like running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop.
Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it, which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights.
They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things you had to keep doing over and over again.
I think I am much less remote than the poster, and I can easily lose power for a week or more after a winter storm. Considering that they already have generators on site that can manage the full load, they probably have much better up time than the utility electricity provider.
We can run on generator to charge the batteries for about 2 weeks on the fuel we keep. Other than that, we rebuild what isn’t broken and later buy more panels. Most of our mounts should be good to about 150mph, but trees also fly so?
Good news is we can buy panels here about $120 for a 500 watt panel.
Also we have some geographic protection from the full brunt of a storm , as we are in a mountainous eddy zone that typically sees about 30 percent of the coastal and mountaintop wind speed when a cyclone passes nearby as they frequently do.
I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least the smallest and most remote communities.
https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-co...
and moved to the pilot phase:
https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/
A review of some of the feasability studies carried out in phase one:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
Is there any documentation of your solar microgrid systems for learning purposes? Or better can anyone visit your farm for learning the microgrid systems?
I just found these article back in 2017 and 2022 on microgrid installation in the Caribbean and they looks like promising off-grid solutions for tropical islands [1],[2].
[1] Why Solar Microgrids May Fall Short in Replacing the Caribbean’s Devastated Power Systems (2017):
https://spectrum.ieee.org/should-a-devastated-caribbean-leap...
[2] As rich nations haggle over climate solutions, storm-ravaged Caribbean is taking matters into its own hands (2022):
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/caribbean-solar-pow...
When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles.
It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.
It’s a ratchet:
Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Can’t buy more panels, need more batteries to stabilize the system. Thankfully , batteries are getting better and cheaper! Lots of power, so much we need to find new ways to benefit from it! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! ……
The economics of panels are basically 20 percent APR here over 20 years. Over 40 years it drops to around 10 percent for out of service life panels.
We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.
This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered.
The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water.
We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility.
There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use.
The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol.
Anyway, that’s the view from space.
Also, yeah, I know. Wordpress wasn’t a great choice even years ago when I set up the blog, but I was going to self host as a static site “soon” anyway and I needed to get started… almost good enough is the mortal enemy of adequate.
Would you mind sharing some more design details?
Questions that come to mind: What products are you using? Are you doing any AC-coupling between inverters? If not, are you just running your PV wires between buildings? Are you stepping up your AC voltages to 480v or so to cover greater distances with less loss? Thanks!
The panels are mostly centralized with each string being a home-run to the power plant but we are building out an additional 10KW on a rooftop about 200 yards away, so that will be 600VDC buried cable.
We are testing small ( panel-back attached )grid-tie inverters for supplemental power at point of use, but we will see how much we can add before it results in stability issues. It would be great to be able to put a panel or two wherever it’s handy and just tie each panel separately into the ac distribution.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to run direct DC appliances?
We have a building on our farm without power and it'd be ideal to be able to charge batteries and run lights at night
It seems to me that we would have to upsize batteries in order to make up for the loss in converting to AC
Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power.
Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of that.
20 years or so ago I rebuilt a 60’ schooner, and even on that scale AC was by far the best choice. Just the wiring for a DC system was more expensive then double Refund inverters, and most of the appliances were actually less efficient, since they had their own inverters inside them (DC-DC converters). In all there just wasn’t any justification, and corrosion is another issue on boats, so we went all AC.
I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter. Just have one AC-DC converter per building.
I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that would be good for all devices.
There are probably safety reasons why this future might be difficult.
1. Switching. If you go look at your favorite part supplier you can find a bunch of switches that are rated to switch 250 volts AC and pass 16 amps, enough for basically any standard household outlet anywhere in the world. Those same switches are only rated for 24 volts DC. Why? Because of arcing. AC voltage passes through zero twice a cycle, which means that any arc that may be formed will self-extinguish within a hundredth of a second. DC doesn't do that, so the arc potential has to be limited either by reducing the voltage or increasing the size/complexity/cost of the switch/relay/contactor itself. This also applies to any connectors that may be unplugged under power like wall outlets. If you want to do the same amount of work with DC as you do with AC you basically get the choice between doing it at lower voltage with thick expensive wires or doing it at higher voltage with expensive switches, relays, outlets, etc.
2. Motors. Synchronous AC motors are EVERYWHERE. They're simple, cheap, efficient, and as long as they're not overloaded they run at a consistent speed determined by the number of magnetic poles in the motor and the AC frequency. If you have an appliance or power tool that runs on mains power and does not offer motor speed control (or only offers two or three speed settings) it's likely one of these. Native DC motors are also cheap and simple but but have very different performance characteristics, no native mechanism for precise speed control, and flow current through the rotor which requires brushed contacts that wear out over time. "Brushless DC" motors are actually AC motors paired with a controller which is more or less a DC->AC inverter, adding cost and complexity that may not be otherwise necessary or beneficial to the application.
3. Voltage conversion. AC can use simple wound transformers to efficiently trade voltage for current or vice versa using nothing but wire and metal. You might have used or even built one in a middle-school era science class. DC voltage conversion on the other hand, the simple methods are inefficient and the efficient methods require high-frequency electronics which only became inexpensive enough to go mainstream in the last 50ish years.
None of these are insurmountable problems of course, especially these days when switch-mode power supplies, inverters, VFDs, etc. are cheaper than ever but they still make things more complicated and require going against in some cases multiple lifetimes of industry inertia to purchase equipment produced in much lower volumes which means higher costs, and especially for home applications where size and weight are not the biggest deals it can often be easier/cheaper to just run a larger solar/battery setup to counteract the efficiency losses.
In the RV and boat worlds where size and weight matter you'll find a lot more DC appliances, but those are also generally smaller capacity than a household equivalent.
Do you have a tech blog or writeup on what things you used, what parts broke down, or what kind of things needed to be fixed over time?
I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600)
It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or £1 a kwhr)
I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and have solar, and optimise for cost.
This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV.
That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from your battery :)
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
https://agilebuddy.uk/historic/agile
has some historic prices. We still use gas for heating, so there isn't so much seasonality for consumption. (there is, but not in the same way).
What does affect price is wind. you can see in december there were both record high prices and record low. The more wind we have the cheap power becomes. so in winter its generally quite cheap, but then also it can flip and become very expensive, because gas imports are expensive.
Liability coverage, and UL certification (or UK/EU equivalent), for the company is. Though see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEVSE
> I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house.
With regards to EV and the grid, see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
* Also: https://www.ampcontrol.io/post/what-are-ocpp-iec-63110-iso-1...
For an (industrial) electrical communication protocol, perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61850
I have also heard that if you go all in it works much better. It does have the nice feature of diverting to other devices instead of the grid, and giving priority to certain devices.
Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc.
So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
I wish it had all of that. I would actually pay for that. The Zappi from myenergi promises much but fails to deliver.
Dead Comment
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Should write a blog post about it :-)
Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
We rebuilt our house in the SF Bay Area in 2022 and went fully electric, no gas line anymore. It was really sad that I couldn't resuse any of my previous 12 kwh solar panels that were fully functioning and had another 10-15 years on them as they wouldn't match the new regulations.
I tried to get them installed on a separate area in my own backyard for off-the-grid charger just for my car, but you are not allowed to have a big off-the-grid system unconnected to PG&E. No electrician was willing to help with risk of losing license. The author was lucky that his dad could help with electrical.
Due to similar issues, I couldn't find anyone to take them for free as well. Demo dad was a truly sad day to watch these perfectly functioning solar panels being destroyed by a crane.
Used solar panels are a pretty brisk business right now. Lots of places are replacing their 10-15 year-old panels with new ones just due to the better efficiency and capacity alone. And now that we have over a decade of large-scale solar experience to draw from, we are finding that they tend to degrade a lot slower than expected and that the original 30-year lifespan was highly conservative. I'm surprised you couldn't find someone from out of state to buy them.
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Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
A $45k quote would correspond roughly to 14k euro of materials.
New subsidies this year for batteries mean I can get a 15kwh battery installed for around 2-3k AUD
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
If you're able to get a 12kW rated full system, including racking, panels, and inverter for the equivalent of $1/W that's an amazing deal! I wish prices here were like that.
Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950. Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat pump, elec hot water) was $1000.
Snowy mountain town in a tight valley in BC.
Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started their own installer business. Many of those businesses were poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by every other installer that they will not work on someone else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it will result in their warranty being voided.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
20× 455 W Canadian Solar panels (~$173 ea)
1× GridBoss MID V2 (~$2 400)
1× FlexBoss 21 (~$2 400)
4× Eco-Worthy 48 V 100 Ah LiFePO₄ batteries (~$1 500 ea)
18 U server rack (~$500) — total hardware ~$14 760
My big hang-up has been the rooftop work, permitting and inspections—almost no one I call will touch a true DIY system. If anyone here in the Bay Area has recommendations for installers or back-of-house permit-whisperers who’ll partner on a non-Tesla/Sunrun job, I’d love to hear how you made it happen. Thanks again for the inspiring guide!
I recently did an Enphase system of a similar size to yours. It was fully DIY except for wiring the combiner and a roofing company to plug all the holes I drilled. Working with PG&E was truly an epic year-plus battle culminating in a CPUC complaint, but in the end it was really just a bunch of emails.
I don't have any installer recommendations, but it should be easy enough to find a local electrician, and I've found that they tend to know others in adjacent fields.
Where you live it’s only 24,000 kWh to pay off the hardware, or just under 3 years ($0.61/kWh). I’d definitely pull the trigger.
Democracy really limits governments
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