Pre-Installation – Our journey to Solar Electricity (part 1)

Our journey to building a solar electric system began with an interest of separating ourselves from the grid. Our house is in a semi-rural area where all of our systems run off of electricity or oil. Oil runs our boiler which heats the house and provides the heat for the hot-water system; electricity powers all our other systems including our well-pump. After attending a couple seminars at Solarfest, we thought a solar hot-water system would be the best starting point for us since it would hopefully offset some of our dependence on outside oil. Also, solar hot-water systems are not that expensive compared to solar electric systems so it seemed a good venture into the solar world. Well, upon further investigation we found out that although we could have built a solar hot-water system to offset our domestic hot water needs (showers, dish water etc.), a system to offset our winter heating needs would been very challenging. The reason for this is because obviously you need a lot of hot water to heat a house, and during the winter when the house needs the heat is the point at which the water must be heated the most and when the sun is in the sky the shortest period of time. It could have been done with lots of solar hot water panels, but then in the summer when we needed very little hot water, we would have had to cover or disconnect most of these panels so that the system did not generate so much hot water. This complexity, combined with the fact that we could not find a plumber in our area that was willing to work with my solar contractor (PVSquared) forced us to eventually abandon the pursuit of solar hot water.

All of that being said, we continued out pursuit almost a year later by deciding on making the jump to solar electric. Once again we contacted our solar installer (PVSquared), and this time asked them to help us design a solar electric system. We didn’t know if we could have solar electric since our roof pitches east/west and the ideal is for it to pitch south. We were told that we could mount the panels on poles which would get us around the roof problem. Well, after a site analysis was done, it was determined that the west facing roof was actually our best option. The reason for this was because it was high up above most tree-shading and because we had a relatively large roof allowing for lots of panels. I should explain that solar panels come in all sorts of sizes and wattages, but the more wattage output per square foot means a higher price.

Continued in Part 2…