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Leo Voisine

Leo Voisine

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Location
East Freeetown, Massachusetts
It is all installed and hooked up.

Not turned on yet.

Waiting for town inspection and also waiting for power company to upgrade wire from pole to house and to install a new meter.

It was turn on for a few minutes - at a generation rate of 6500 KWH
 
Very nice! If you get a chance to post some pictures, that would be great.

I'm assuming it's a grid tied system? Do you have an storage as part of the system for when the power goes out?
 
I am with Jim, probably watts...

Leo thats a pretty good setup if it got to generating 6500 watts question is at what output voltage?

Thing is do you have a bank of batteries and inverter or is the surplus power fed into the grid to get you credits for the nighttime use?

If i ever install solar i want self reliance and off the grid. But storing 6500 watts is a lot of storage.

Almost 50% of our electric bill here is not for the actual commodity and a huge portion is for debt recovery paying for green energy at a higher price than we can generate or buy it. Makes zero sense to me.
 
Leo what is payback time? Brother installed one in Albuquerque and says 5 years. Wife says 8 years. There ties into grid and has been working flawlessly. But then lots of sun in N.Mex.right Vaughn? To make it work here in Missouri I'd have to cut down a lot of trees which I do not want to do.
I suppose the cost per kw is rating factor.
David
 
It makes perfect sense, Rob.

The utilities have stacked the deck to get paid their costs even if they do not deliver the goods. Like the water company charging a monthly availability charge even if you have a well because their water line goes past your property.

When you price yourself out of the market and customers look for other solutions as a result, the infrastructure still has to be maintained, etc. So the first thing they do is itemize the bill and you can easily see that your consumption is the least cost to them. The customer always pays all of the costs (as you well know) no matter how it is packaged. Its like 'free' shipping. Somebody pays and that somebody is always the shipping is always the customer. Free shipping offers simply mean the shipping costs have been rolled into the selling price.

It makes perfect sense to them.

Us? We have to pick our battles.
 
We have what sounds like a similar-sized system on our place... 22 panels, IIRC, with a rated generation of 6.5 kW. Ours has been installed for about 1.5 years, and it looks like the payback will be at around 7-8 years. That's in NC with state and federal tax credits totaling 65% of the cost of the system.

Rob, while the capability to store your excess generation sounds appealing, it significantly increases both the cost and maintenance of the system. Ultimately, we decided to go with "grid storage"; any excess feeds the grid and offsets our usage for the month. At the end of the month, any credit that we haven't used is paid back as a credit on our bill.

This sort of system doesn't let us go off-grid, but made more sense in terms of a rate of return on that money invested.

--dave
 
Nevada has enacted some rules that make those payback numbers harder to get to. I.e. Dropping the amount the pay a homeowner per Kwh and raising the base charge. It's increasing the payback time enough that some of the solar install companies are pulling out of Nevada entirely.

I'm kind of in Robs Camp that if I was going to do it, I would want to be able to have storage so that I could go off grid with it. That would be tough to do though as it would require quite a large storage bank.

It'd be nice to reduce the electric bills with a grid tied system, but I'd be looking for something that would be able to supply a substantial amount of power for when the power goes out for longer periods of time.

http://www.treehugger.com/environme...ar-industry-state-new-net-metering-rules.html
 
Brent Dowell said:
Nevada has enacted some rules that make those payback numbers harder to get to. I.e. Dropping the amount the pay a homeowner per Kwh and raising the base charge. It's increasing the payback time enough that some of the solar install companies are pulling out of Nevada entirely.
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Yeah, NC got rid of the state credits this year and that changes the equation significantly. The rate of installs has decreased significantly and many of the installers have gone out of business or laid off numbers of employees.

We are lucky that our electrical utility is a local co-op that sees the benefits of solar, so our net metering scheme is fair to both them and us. Most of the state is under the Duke monopoly, and their policies are not as good.


--dave
 
Based on Mass credits, Federal Credits and SRECS, as well as the energy cost savings I anticipate 3-5 years to entirely pay for the system, based purely on the numbers in the spreadsheet.

ROI is a little longer - about 10 years

After 10 years is the real savings.

I am not thinking just in term of my electric usage, but also in converting a few other energy sources into electric. One of the biggies is the propane heater in my shop. I will be adding in a 7500 watt electric heater to offset or eliminate the propane heater. I also added in a central air system with heat pump. I plan to offset some of the oil fired heat in the house on days where you just need to take the chill off and it's not cold enough to fire up the wood stove. Also will be converting the propane cook stove to electric.



More than anything else. My main outlook is in how can I reduce my living expenses after I retire.

In retirement, you either need more money or you need to live cheaper. I cannot get more money, so, I need to live cheaper.

Rob, I would love to go off grid completely, but, I cannot.

There are no storage devices. The new electric meter can run backwards and count the flow of excess generated electricity flowing into the grid. The power company pays for that in credits to be used in time where solar is not producing.

My friend has the same system. He showed me his electric bill. His bill was ZERO. He is generating more than he needs and rerouting the excess power to his daughters house to reduce her electric bill.
 
I do wonder about the after 10 years real savings comment? A house just a bit from me, took out the solar panels on the roof, last year (maybe two ago). I don't know if it was solar for electric, or solar heating, but it was installed when Carter started those initiatives. The panels looked really hazy now, compared to how they did then. (how do you maintain panels and prevent that)
What about loss of generation from that, or other efficiency decreases? How easy and costly is it to upgrade and where is the payback point to do so, as panels effectiveness increases? (love to see a comparison of those old solar panels to what you have and see if a projection of efficiency could be predicted)
How easy will these be to maintain when your older? (up on ladders, etc)
There have been so many improvements (multilayers cells that reflect light to more cells, rather then one layer of cells, materials improvement, layout improvements (Fibonacci), etc), that I really question that 10 year benefit.
 
Randal Stevenson said:
I do wonder about the after 10 years real savings comment? A house just a bit from me, took out the solar panels on the roof, last year (maybe two ago). I don't know if it was solar for electric, or solar heating, but it was installed when Carter started those initiatives. The panels looked really hazy now, compared to how they did then. (how do you maintain panels and prevent that)
What about loss of generation from that, or other efficiency decreases? How easy and costly is it to upgrade and where is the payback point to do so, as panels effectiveness increases? (love to see a comparison of those old solar panels to what you have and see if a projection of efficiency could be predicted)
How easy will these be to maintain when your older? (up on ladders, etc)
There have been so many improvements (multilayers cells that reflect light to more cells, rather then one layer of cells, materials improvement, layout improvements (Fibonacci), etc), that I really question that 10 year benefit.
Click to expand...


Short answer - I don't know.

I bought my first "real" computer in about 1988 or 1989. Al Gore had not yet invented the internet. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but I believed it was going to be a pretty important thing to learn. I was fairly new into my continuing education as a manufacturing engineering student. I think I paid close to $2000 for that 386DX25 computer with 4 MEGS of RAM and a 90 MEG hard drive. On todays market that is a toy worth less than $10. That computer did a lot for me. Since then I have bought a LOT of computers, and never looked back.

Technology changes and grows at a rapid rate. Todays solar panels are better than those of 10 - 20 - 30 years ago. I am sure in 10 or 20 years future the new technology will again be much better and I will have a dinosaur on my roof, just like the house a bit from you. In fact, I do "expect" that to happen.

Those that question the validity of this sort of technology should not invest in it. You need to weigh the risk, but also the benefit. Maybe the real savings there is that the money is not wasted by not buying into it. That would be the best bet for sure - if - it were true, but in reality the future is not written, we just don't know.

It's a lot like the stock market - "maybe" the payout is great - but then again "maybe not".

I cannot prove that this is worth it. Ask again in 10 years and I will know for sure.
 
From the numbers I've run around half or maybe a bit more is all the things other than the panels. The cost of the panels themselves is falling by roughly half every three to four years so even if the panels need to be replaced it could still end up working out.

This is with a lot of projecting past trends into the future which is always a bit of a fools errand, but the odds don't look horrible.
 
From the numbers I've run around half or maybe a bit more is all the things other than the panels. The cost of the panels themselves is falling by roughly half every three to four years so even if the panels need to be replaced it could still end up working out.

This is with a lot of projecting past trends into the future which is always a bit of a fools errand, but the odds don't look horrible.
 
David Johnson said:
Leo what is payback time? Brother installed one in Albuquerque and says 5 years. Wife says 8 years...
Click to expand...

I don't know for residential installations, but the solar cells the City of Albuquerque installed on the Airport parking structure paid for themselves in something like 3 to 4 years. Now they actually generate positive cashflow, as I understand it. I don't recall the details, but the initial program was successful enough that the Aviation Department has now put solar cells on the Terminal building, too.

Randal Stevenson said:
I do wonder about the after 10 years real savings comment? A house just a bit from me, took out the solar panels on the roof, last year (maybe two ago). I don't know if it was solar for electric, or solar heating, but it was installed when Carter started those initiatives...QUOTE]

I'd bet dollars to donuts that those panels were for hot water, or house heat. Back when Carter started the initiative, photovoltaic cells were generally too expensive for residential installations.
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