All Systems Go

Talk about a weight off. Fred from Greenlight Solar was by this afternoon to solve the mystery of the panel that reported no electricity.

Immediately after the solar array was installed, first the shutoff was in the “off” position, and then the weather was uncooperative. Cloudy skies and snow on the roof meant it was difficult to tell if all the panels were working properly. And without knowing that it was working, I was nervous about making the final payments.

Finally last week, there was some full sun and the roof was mostly clear. We were generating about 2,500 watts… but not all the panels were playing along. I took this picture:

The arrow is pointing to the panel 063754, and the squares are the other two zeroes. The two with snow on them I could understand, but the other one should have been generating power, because it was clear. I was worried that I had a bad panel or something.

When Fred showed up today, he climbed up and immediately saw what the problem was. Each pair of panels shares a micro-inverter. The panel with an arrow was the odd one out, with its own micro-inverter. When they had plugged it in, it was plugged into channel 2 instead of channel 1. It actually was generating power, but not reporting it. Fred could have just updated the reporting app, but he just unplugged it from 2 and plugged it into 1. When the system came back up, the panel was reporting just fine.

Now it’s all working. Acacia Engineering should be here at 8 am on Tuesday to do the follow up energy evaluation, and then we will be at the last stage of this long journey.

Updated

The energy re-evaluation is delay until Friday thanks to the evaluator’s car breaking down yesterday, but we’re still on track.

I got Fred to take a couple of pictures of the array when he was up on the roof.