{"id":2437,"date":"2021-05-19T15:31:09","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T23:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/?p=2437"},"modified":"2021-05-19T15:32:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T23:32:39","slug":"even-more-solar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/19\/even-more-solar\/","title":{"rendered":"Even more solar!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose we will always be working on our house in some form or another.\u00a0 We still have lots of little decorating tweaks to do, some rooms still to furnish, wallpaper here or there.\u00a0 In terms of major things, we are getting down to the last few.<\/p>\n

One of which is solar.\u00a0 We initially added 8Kw of solar<\/a> on a single roof plane, because we weren’t sure how much usage we would have and we didn’t want to overbuild the solar.\u00a0 But at the time we first inatalled solar, we also installed additional roof brackets and conduits for more.<\/p>\n

Then after a year, it became clear we could handle quite a bit more, with our electricity usage, and we also got an electric car, and installed a pool.\u00a0 So we installed another 6.4 Kw of solar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And we still weren’t quite producing as much as we were using, so this year we installed another 4Kw, putting panels wherever we could.<\/p>\n

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You can see the new panels are considerably cleaner than the older ones.\u00a0 Not to self to get up there with the softened water to wash them all off.\u00a0 That mostly maxes out our solar potential, mostly because we can’t add any more without up-sizing our two existing inverters.\u00a0 But I don’t think we will need more than that.\u00a0 With some efficient time use of electricity, we should do pretty well.<\/p>\n

We didn’t stop there however.\u00a0 We also installed some solar water panels for our pool.<\/p>\n

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This involved digging about a 50 or 60 foot trench to get the water between the panels and the pump.<\/p>\n

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The pool solar panels took the pool from 70 degrees all the way to 86 in a week, in mid April.\u00a0 Pool season is here!<\/p>\n

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So far we’ve hit a high of 89 with just the solar panels.\u00a0 The temp has dropped a bit in the last two weeks as we are experiencing some of our towns infamous “May Grey” in which the sky is overcast for most of the day.\u00a0 This also about cuts our solar electric production by 30-50%.<\/p>\n

Overall, I am pretty happy with what we’ve done with our house resource wise.<\/p>\n