Inspections and Commissioning – Our journey to Solar Electricity (part 4)

After the installation was complete our next step was the inspections. We had pulled both building and electrical permits because we had changed the structure of the house by adding the panels on the roof. It is important to remember that town inspectors usually have other jobs so please add some time in your project schedule to allow for the inspection process, and plan on having someone be available to show the inspector around and answer questions. In our case the inspections only took about a week to get completed and were completed without any problems.

After the inspections were complete the electric company was given the ok to switch out our main electric meter. The main electric meter that we had would not net meter and without this type of meter we would not get credit for the electricity that our solar electric system generated. In our town this switch could only happen when the meter was about to be read so this is something to keep in mind when trying to scheduling your system to be commissioned. In our case, this was only about a week after the inspections were completed.

Once our meter was switched out, our last and final step was to schedule the commissioning. Simply put, commissioning is nothing more then turning on the system. For us, this happened on Friday, May 18, 2007 following a detailed walk-through of the system components by our solar installer (PVSquared).

Since then our system has been consistently churning out electricity even on cloudy and rainy days. We will keep this site up to date with the amount generated (the current graphs are at the bottom of the page.)

Our journey to Solar Electricity was a long process, but one that was well worth taking.

Please keep checking back to see how we are doing and other posts on Solar Electricity and related articles.