I thought my setup with a photo diary might help others. I passed my Electrical Final inspection yesterday, now I'm just waiting for PTO.
First let me give thanks to the following people and companies:
@Will Prowse for creating his Youtube channel and this forum and selflessly helping others...
First negative power bill! -$44.94
Something that did not occur to me, my taxes are a negative value too. So hopefully I will never see power bill again, only credits. Then once a year, maybe around April, I'll get the power company to write me a check for the balance.
It's working...
Finished installing the Heat Pump Hot Water Heater along with a mixing valve about ten days ago. Set the temperature of the 80 gallon Rheem to 150 degrees and the mixing valve to 130 degrees. I have it set on the Energy Saver mode which mostly uses the heat pump unless the temp gets too low...
Added more parts and source information to the first post. I think that will cover the equipment shown in the Line Diagram. Hopefully it will helps others as I spent a lot of time researching parts.
Saw a freak PV input of 26.1kW when the sun was shining directly on the panels and some puffy...
Oh, I was off grid at that time. In fact, I just got my PTO a few minutes ago. Amazing that I passed my Final Electrical and get my PTO in less than 24 hours.
Got a full day of sun since getting my PTO yesterday. The Sol-Ark 15K was limiting to 16kW to the grid. A call into Sol-Ark support and they were able to upgrade the firmware and make a change later in the day so I can send up to 32kW, but I had them reduce it to 25kW as that is what my...
Thank you. My wife calls me slow because of how long things take for me to do. I'm very meticulous and want things done right. Though my wife has the patience of an explosion. I could teleport and it would still not be fast enough. :)
edit: remembered about my wife's patience.
Found the Growatt 10KW MIN10000TL-XH-US which is fully compliant from Signature Solar. Going to get two of those instead of the 3 6K and it will only be $100 more. Problem solved.
My wife is very good with the finances and she takes care of the bills. She is a saver for sure. Our finances are tied together and we live frugally. We work together on all of our spending. We don't drive new cars. Hers is from 2007 and mine is 2003. Through her saving and my hard work...
Yes, my utility credits my generation at 5.5 cents and debits 11.627 cents for consumption. They also have a 4pm-8pm on peak demand charge of $2.00 per kWh. I run 100% off the batteries during that time and do peak shaving at 1500 watts during the rest of the night.
Also reading that TurboTax thread along with the links in that thread from post 27 goes into it fuller. I also prefaced it by saying it's "safe to assume". Based on all the information going back and forth.
Summary quote from that TurboTax thread:
"There is nothing in the law that limits the...
Holy Export Batman!!!
Hit 28kW PV today. My export limit is 25kW with my utility so, that is about as high as it's going to get with the Sol-Ark before it starts curtailing the output. :(
So I'm going to expand my battery storage now. After the CME and us disconnecting from the grid during that time I had to run the generator a bit to get us through a morning rain. My wife really does not like how loud the generator is and I'm like, when the grid is down, we'll have power, I...
Finished running a Cat6A Ethernet drop to the Inverter location yesterday. Going to plug the Sol-Ark 15K and the two Growatt inverters into wired Ethernet. Punched a 1-1/4" hole into the wireway to add some conduit going up the side for the low voltage wires to run through. Going to mount the...
20 hours DC off, no grid at the time. Sol-Ark charged the batteries up to my threshold for AC coupling, 95% at the time and shutdown the AC Coupling until the batteries got to 90% then kicked the Growatts back on to get it to 95% then off again. Ran on battery the whole night, in the morning...
Put the high altitude gasoline carburetor jet in the Firman Tri-Fuel (T07053) generator yesterday, put the oil in it, and ran it off of natural gas for 10 minutes to make sure it worked. Today we had snow and pretty much no solar. Great time to run the generator for the five hours to break it...
I wondering if I should change the first post and add all the parts used and sources for those parts. I know it was a pain doing all the research needed for everything and sourcing it. Would this be beneficial for others?
Plan to grow the ESS to 60kWh and to add a single LFP EV in the future. Can't really get into costs. I budgeted $38K for the install, and I went way over. Wire, electrical components, and racking were a lot higher than I anticipated. Needed to buy two more SOK batteries as well as I was...
I think the beta does now, reading the changelog it seems to support the Growatt MIN TL-XH-US:
https://solar-assistant.io/help/updates/changelog
I'd have to buy a second Solar Assistant to monitor those. Though Home Assistant is supposed to monitor them and I may use Home Assistant along with...
That is what it seemed to be in the beginning. James West from Growatt said that at 60.03 Hz the Growatt's start to curtail their output and that the Sol-Ark was not outputting 60.00 Hz. I've asked Sol-Ark to add another zero so we can see hundreds of a Hz. Either way, once James set the...
I wanted to say thanks for all the posts. The wire sizes, especially the KCMIL as I did not understand it at first. 4/0 = 212 KCMIL. So once I understood this, things got easier.
The Ferraz Shawmut 69093 has a size from 4/0 to 500 KCMIL, which is a pretty darn big hole.
Found another video...
Hopefully this thread helps others. The covers part number (need 3) for MPDB69123 distribution block is MPDBC6869. Also bought them from Factory Mation for $6.75 each:
https://www.factorymation.com/MPDBC6869
Thank you for the back and forth debate. I think it's safe to assume, that as long as it's "new", it can be added in following years. I won't have to convince the CFO (wife) that we need to buy five more SOK batteries this year and we can push it to next year when we actually see the Federal...
I was getting some questions in another thread about how much I spent and I kinda wanted to keep what I spent personal, but I guess that will be a big deciding factor for many. So I'll add to this thread what I posted.
I originally budgeted $38K. The system cost me about $55K. Went way over...
I saw the EG4 Chargeverter V2 is coming out: https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-chargeverter-gc-48v-100a-battery-charger-5120w-output-240-120v-input-pre-order/
Looks like new features:
Dry Contacts:
Control of generator start/stop function based on Voltage or state of charge (SOC)
Using EG4...
Yesterday I made my first 10 MegaWatts, yay! My utility adds a few extra charges such a delivery fee, time of use, taxes, etc. Those come out to be about $40 a month. My utility bills have before the solar was installed were normally been between $225-$400. The bills have been as follows...
Good to hear about the BlueSun panels. Hopefully my results will be good as they will only be going on my roof and will get next to nothing from the bifacial part (though I read during cloudy days they still work better).
Today my building department approved my permit. Going to order a...
Wanted to bring this thread back up as I don't think you can claim additions to your system, which I was planning on as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/solar-tax-credit-by-state/
Quote: "It’s essential to note that you can only claim...
I guess I never thought my battery wouldn't be full by the time the cloud lens hit. So it would have a place to dump the excess energy. 30.2kW spike today today and it's totally cloudy out as we are expecting snow this afternoon.
Sometimes this just seems to defy logic.