HVAC - anyone know a guy?

[thecampster]

Okay so some people make it sound like "everyone can go solar....its so easy". Somehow some way the installers convinced the inspector to pass the house based on their word the repairs were done. I did the smoke alarms and they moved the panels but make no mistake, the system is still not working. I had to go out and properly setup the batteries to stop the island from throwing errors. Solar company couldn't figure it out...yes the "PROs". The inverter maker "SMA" decided not to support it because even though they have an "other" setting in their inverters...they don't support "other". So I had to figure it out. The Islands are no longer throwing errors.

But now that the charging/grid half of the install is right, the DC inverters are stating the installers wired it wrong. Throwing 1001 errors...L/N (load/neutral) swapped.  I set it up right Thursday on the islands to get to these new errors and the earliest they can get out to do voltage testing and figure out where they screwed up is Tuesday or Wednesday (yes they couldn't give me a day and I'm getting very close to hiring one of the board's legal eagles). The panels have been on the roof (or most of them) for about a month now and I still am not generating power or living off the batteries at night. This whole rush to going green comes with some serious bumps in the road.

The installers insisted I go with common components they've worked with before and then come to find out the last time they did an SMA install with 2 phase power was 2 years ago. After some calling around I've found out this is par for the course in the solar industry. That often the best installs are the one the home owner does himself.

[thecampster]

So it's all been set up right for 5 days now except they didn't set up the backup panel to be..well...backup (lost power Thursday). I've been creating between 51 and 64 kwh of power during that time (depending on cloud cover/temp). I've been using about 33kwh per day. So although making more than I use, since nothing is backed up, I'm not self consuming at night off the batteries. But I'm making more than I expected and am now using less than before since the power company put me on the new meter.

Solar company is coming out Thursday to connect the backup panel properly (doesn't have connection to the PV loads panel) and we should be done. Estimates are now that I'll pretty much be using all my own power, using a bit from the grid and selling about 3x that amount to the grid. One final update with graphs in a few days.

[thecampster]

Okay see the below graphs. 1 = the daily production for Nov 24, a day I produced 60 kwh.

Graph 2 is daily production, lower numbers are cloudy/rainy days. 

Graph 3 shows the production for the month so far.

Graph 4 is my energy usage the last 13 months. See starting July the gradual drop in energy usage. This is the effect of the new HVAC. Now see November. This is is the effect of the solar finally working. If I have a problem right now is that I'm not self consuming on my batteries very much and nobody is able to figure out why. So all of my extra production is going into the grid at 3 cents/kwh.  So take my usage for November, it was about $100 total in bill. I sent about 1000 kw up to the utility company so my real bill is about $68. My utility pays out your net metering annually. So I'll get a rebate check once a year for $350 ish.  Also in Summer the sun is up about 4 additional hours so I'll use less from the utility then and do much better. And this should be the end of this thread. Mods can lock it in a few weeks I'd think.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/view/wk1rj3sgojyl3p8/Solar_November.jpg/file

 

Edited November 29, 2020 by thecampster