Solar

We finally got the solar panels up on the garage!

It’s hard to see in that photo up there but that’s the best angle I could get because MrsGF won’t let me up on a roof. (But she has no problem making me climb a rickety old stepladder in the house to clean the tops of the kitchen cabinets) The guys did a very good job. They ran out of daylight before they could get the wiring done but we jury rigged some connections to test them and they work quite well.

They’re 420W bifacial panels. Because they’re roof mounted like that the bifacial bit isn’t going to be very helpful, but at the time I bought them they were the cheapest panels in that wattage range. If I remember right I picked them up for about $107 each plus shipping, which by today’s prices, is ridiculously cheap here in the US.

Anyway we were testing them at the time I took that photo. You can see that not only is it cloudy, but it’s already starting to get dark. Much to our surprise they were still putting out 400W.

Of course the weather had to turn bad right after they were put up and it rained all day today. I switched them in just for the heck of it and the dopey things were putting out 300 – 500w. In the rain. I’m not entirely sure how that’s even possible.

So now we have about 4.2KW of solar up on the roof. Once I put the ground mount panels back in place we’ll have over 6KW total. That’s going to be quite a change from having only about 2KW solar.

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Author: grouchyfarmer

Yes, I'm a former farmer. Sort of. I'm also an amateur radio operator, amateur astronomer, gardener, maker of furniture, photographer.

11 thoughts on “Solar”

    1. Thanks. I hope we do. I’m hoping that I’ll have enough solar panels out there now to be able to take 80% or more of our electrical needs off-grid entirely now, not just during perfect weather. I could run the house off the solar system just fine before now, but only when the weather was perfect and the sun was shining because I didn’t have enough solar panels out there to both run the house and recharge the battery capacity we’d use overnight.

      We’ve been putting up with a utility company that is… Well let’s just call it absolutely horrid and leave it at that. Not only has our electric rate been going up almost every single year, but service has actually been getting worse every year as well. Our rate went up 11% im 2023. about 4% in 2024, 5% at the start of this year, and now another 13% coming at the end of this year. That’s what… a 35% increase in the last 3 or so years? And at one of the last Public service commission meetings they were mumbling something about maybe needing another increase of as much as 18%.

      Now our electric company is going to have to build more than $2 billion worth of new generating facilities in order to just feed the new Microsoft, Oracle and Meta data centers going up in southern Wisconsin. I won’t go into all of the BS that’s going on with this company and the other utility companies in the state. What it boils down to is that nobody, and I mean nobody, believes anything this company or the others say any more because they’ve flat out lied to us so often in the past.

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        1. It’s getting outrageous, really. It’s not just the rates, either. It’s the “fixed fees” that keep going up and up and new ones beimg added all the time. There are distribution charges, taxes, fees for this, fees for that… It amounts to something like $54/month im fees even if I used no electricity at all.

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  3. One of our neighbours at the back had lots of solar panels installed on their roof five years ago. I was out dog-walking with my dog and she came up with her dog to tell me about it. It cost them a great deal of money at the time, she told me it would take them almost fifteen years to recover the installation costs from the savings on electricity bills. However, it not only covered all of their household electical use, they were generating enough power to sell some back to the utility provider. So in theory, she would have zero electricity bills forever, and get around £800 a year income from the sell-back. As there is only me and my wife in our small house, our electricity bills are very reasonable, so it wasn’t worth us getting the solar panels then. She is also 10 years younger than me so has longer to benefit.

    Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. If you have to hire a contractor instead of doing most of the work yourself the way I did you can pretty much look at it costing at least twice as much as what my system cost, probably round $35,000 – $40,000 to put in a solar system that can fully support the energy needs of the average house in the US which is about 30 KWh/day. (I’ll leave it to you to convert US $ to £) In the UK I believe prices are a bit cheaper because you don’t have the utterly ridiculous tariff and taxes to deal with that we do here. But yeah, the up-front cost is still pretty steep.

      My electric bill is running close to $300/month, or about $3,600/year. I have about $20,000 sunk into the system. I’m assuming I can get about 70% of my electric needs from the solar system so that’s about $2,500/year. that would mean the system will have paid for itself in about 8 years, which I think is pretty good. If I’d had to go with a commercially installed system that cost twice as much? That would extend the ROI out to about 16 years and it would be hard to justify that. Especially since I doubt if all of the equipment would last that long.

      Some time ago I said I was going to write an article about solar in general, not just how it works but the financial aspects of it as well as the scams that are so common here in the US. I really should sit down and do that one of these days.

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      1. Our electricity bill is currently £54/$73 a month. But that doesn’t include heating and hot water, which is oil-fired because we live in a village with no gas supply. The price for supplying and installing solar on our roof was quoted at £9,500/$13,000. It is actually more than that, (£11,000/$15,000) but the government would give a grant of £1,500 to make up the difference, so that is allowed for in the final quote.

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