Photovoltaic solar panel installation (in HD)
During the week of June 21, 2010, I had a photovoltaic solar system installed at my home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The installation took place over two days, with the panels installed the first day and the electrical connections completed the second day. The system consists of 18 235-Watt panels, and each panel has a dedicated inverter installed under the solar panel. As you can see, the crews were fast, neat and professional. I shot this with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 digital camera and edited it using Corel VideoStudio Pro x2. Edit: The new digital electric meter was installed on July 14, 2010, so this system is now generating power and feeding the grid. For more about me and what I do, check my website at www.bobkovacs.com.
Video Rating: 5 / 5
@ljpapadak No. If grid power is lost, then there is no power from the solar panels. It’s possible to design a system with batteries, a standby inverter and automatic disconnect switch, but that adds LOTS of complexity. The fact is that the grid is on 99.99 percent of the time, so it’s hard to justify spending $10,000 to handle 5 minutes of outage per year. Still, it’s worth thinking about.
Does your system still work if you loose power from the grid?
@podus12 Thanks!
That was a nice video
@RedwoodGeorge Thanks! And good luck with your system… it’s good to be part of the solution.
Great video! Well shot, well edited with a clear narrative. I’ll be starting on my 6kW system soon and look forward to seeing the meter spin backwards!
Federal rebates are $1,000 per installed (nameplate) kilowatts, up to
‘$6K, can be taken over several tax years. Micro inverters like these are the way to go, but I would wait until later this year when panel makers will include them
within the panel, thus no need to mount the inverters seperately. And they will cost a LOT less than the Enphase inverters used here (which run $160 to $220) per panel. They will also ALL have a warranty equal to the 25 year warranty for the panels.
@artoliva The overall system has a maximum capacity of about 4.2 kW. The realistic maximum is closer to 3.9 kW. This past summer, I saw 3.5 kW output at one point, and that was well past the summer solstice.
very impressive, I am considering building a solar panel “roof” over my backyard shed of about 30′ x 30 to power my home’; just don’t know where to begin..
how much energy do they produce?
@straightshooterz Yes, we are aware of the shade you can see in this video. Since the video was shot, we cut down several trees and will be cutting down several more. We put off installing solar at this house for several years because the house is literally in the middle of the woods. Unfortunately, we have to sacrifice the trees for our solar array.
have you notice the shade issue.
@dahur Hey, thanks for sharing your experience!
@pvreditor
Yes, and the inverters have a warranty of 15 years. I have 16 of them on my system, and I think it’s the way to go.
More pros than cons, IMO.
@Resistoon I’ve not had any of the inverters fail yet, but it’s my understanding that the system will continue to work with all the other inverters if one fails. That means that an inverter failure will knock out only one of the 18 panels and leave the other 17 working.
One other advantage of the roof inverters is that it simplifies the wiring. It’s a simple 240V/30A circuit to the roof and I don’t need heavy cables for DC panels. Thanks for the comment!
Nice documentation video of your install.
I am curious why this system uses an inverter for each panel. Considering the inverter is most likely to fail before anything else in the system, your setup would be harder to replace them than one inverter mounted next to the circuit breaker box.
You got a 52% State/Federal reimbursement? My state just lowered their reimbursement rate for Solar. They want people to get solar, yet keep lowering the rebates to help with the up front costs.
@pvreditor HOLY mackeral!! I wasn’t expecting that kind of number but with the rebates, i guess that’s not bad.. lol.
thanks for the response.
@leonscorpio19 We paid about $32k, and the government (federal and state) will reimburse about 52 percent of the total.
As for running the A/C, we are connected to the grid at all times. When we generate power, we feed power to the grid. When we consume power, we consume it from our panels and the grid. Therefore, the A/C (and all other devices in the house) run perfectly normally.
How much did this install set you back if i may ask and can you run your A/C normally with it?
Great video and thanks.
@taztaz79 Thank you!
Thanks for this video! very nice quality, steady hold camera and nice coments from you in the video!!! great job!
@carypeck No, I’ve not yet had any trouble. However, they were installed at the end of June 2010, so they’ve only been in place for three months. The system could be engineered with batteries and/or other generation devices (such as a windmill), but that would definitely increase the complexity. It definitely could be done, though.
@carypeck Thank you for the quick response. Have you had any trouble with them? They look like they would be hard to get to. Can you add windmill or gen or batteries to this setup?
Thank you Jason
@carypeck They are Enphase M190 inverters. Thanks for stopping by!
What kind of inverters are those? Thank you.