Proposal for collecting home-solar data points.

[phantom power]

I have a proposal, for learning more about home solar installations, and what they cost in various parts of the country (and world). Everybody out there who has installed a home solar facility, post here with a few standard pieces of data:

1) Total cost of the system (maybe also break it out by parts and labor?)
2) Total peak power
3) If possible, actual power would be interesting.
4) Location. Local climate. Number of sunny days per year.
5) What tax breaks, subsidies, etc, did you get?
6) Money saved per year
7) Brand information? (brand of solar cells, brand of inverters, what company installed it, etc)
8) What year was the install (or estimate?)

For the purposes of focusing the discussion, I propose keeping it to either PV, or solar hot water.

If anybody has collected estimates that's good too, but label it as an estimate, since they never map exactly onto reality.

[MercutioATC]

1. I live in Cleveland.

I'd like to install solar, but in Cleveland it would actually DRAIN power from my house...

;)

[NNadir]

2. I like this idea.

I don't happen to have a solar system myself, since it would involve removing some massive ancient trees I rather like (and which provide passive solar cooling in summer). Still I would love to hear from people who do have such systems. I suspect though it would have some bias in the sense that people don't like to feel that they've wasted money and are even less likely to announce they've been had publicly, but hey, it can't hurt. All said and done, it is an excellent idea in principle, although it would involve some work to gather the information, and the amount of work of course, also involves some bias. (It also requires some metering equipment.)

At the end of the day, the best indicator is the energy produced. Solar power, I note is growing exponentially and has been doing so for some time. I hear a lot of talk on the subject.

[phantom power]

3. On that topic, I should add that not all data are required!

As you say, good data on things like actual peak wattage, or savings, etc, may be difficult to compile. If anybody out there has one of these installations, please don't let incomplete data prevent you from posting! However, if you're willing to do the work and compile all of it, you are my hero.

:toast:

[Kolesar]

18. You wrote that post last year

Cutting down trees and all that. And both times, you left out the :sarcasm: notation

[NNadir]

19. Well, I'm an old man, and getting to that age where I repeat myself.

:shrug: With many thousands of posts, I can't remember them all. For some reason lots of other people remember them though.

The trees are still there, bigger and older, just like me.

I still think they're great passive cooling in the summer. Replacing them with solar cells would probably just wear out the air conditioner (which doesn't run all that much in the shade now) faster.

My point is that solar power is not for everyone, as we see from the overall response to this thread. Only one person here even claims to have a system, and he ain't talking.

I've often fantasized about having a "solar energy" experimental farm, where I could grow canola, and rapeseed and other oil crops, have a windmill, some solar cells, etc, just to test this stuff out and see what it really can do. It would be fun to have a website posting results, year round calculation of costs, of wastes, maintenance and, of course, energy measured in some form of joules instead of power in watts, especially magical peak "watts." Most of the sites on these subjects today do not focus so much on results as they do on promises. Many are marketing or trade sites. It's results in which I'm interested, not promises.

Of course, any one data point will to some extent be localized, so my fantasy farm, were it in New Jersey, would not be representative of New Mexico, but still, it would be fun to have such a site to refer to it.

[An_Opened_Hand]

4. Check out Home Power Magazine

Most of the questions you are listing in your post come up in this mag. If you go to the site you can download a PDF of the last issue and selected articles from the most resent issue. It's a very good at showing how different people all over the Country and around the world have installed systems their homes and businesses. Each installation written about has cost, power usage and problems confronted and solved. And I'm talking about every type of alternate and on/off-grid power you can think of. Micro-Hydro, Wind, Solar electric and Solar Heat/Hot Water to name a few. The Magazine is published out of Oregon, I think.

For my first big jump into conservation when I became a new home owner recently was I bought a washing machine(Sbaber) that was written about in the magazine. Wasn't cheap, but it's American made and it saves a lot of both electricity and water. I live with some of the highest electric rates in the Country and my water bills just went up again. I wouldn't have known about this washing machine if it hadn't been featured in Home Power.

No, I don't work for the Magazine, nor do I sell subscriptions to it. I just found it to be the most useful mag for planning a Solar installation. I'm thinking of retro fitting my hot water heater (gas, don't even ask me about my gas bills lately) with one of the solar hot water systems they recently wrote about. Check it out with the link below.

http://www.homepower.com/

[NMDemDist2]

16. welcome to DU dougffox!

:hi:

[yurbud]

5. and does the electricity you don't use go back into the grid...

[skids]

6. Here's my solar "installation"

I have two. They cost $30 for the pair. This brand uses 3 900mAh AA NiMH batteries per unit. Together they light up my back steps just enough so I can avoid stepping on any racoons and find the keyhole. When western civilization collapses, I'll be able to read my old editions of Autoduel Quarterly after dark with them, as I make a people-plow for my matt black turbocharged muscle car.

Performance is pretty good. They last most of the night after a clear winter day, all the way through in the summer, and usually are on later than any sane person would stay out, except on those occasional winter days when it looks like the Dark Lord Sauron is invading.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Couldn't this be modeled, as well?

Granted, it wouldn't yield real-world data, but most of the figures you want are pretty well understood. It would also get you around the problem of subject self-selection. You could program in economies of scale to determine if a crash program of scaling-up solar energy would allow us to avoid many of the problems of a future petroleum power-down. And basically, you could play with the model to your heart's content.

If a well-designed model showed a major savings or economic advantage from home solar energy, it would probably be easy to get funding for a real-world data collection project.

--p!

[phantom power]

8. I know there is modeling software like that. I've never used it.

[skids]

9. Software here:

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/analysis_tools_tech_sol.html

[phantom power]

10. Anybody? Anybody? Beuller?

[NNadir]

11. It would seem there aren't that many solar systems out there.

This is a surprise.

[Massacure]

13. There are hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galaxy alone.

And there are billions of galaxies. If there really aren't that many solar systems, I dare you to count them all! ;)

[NNadir]

14. Yes, but are they all connected to the grid?

I don't think so.

However, I have heard that many star systems put out enough energy to power all of Massachusetts for a week.

[Massacure]

15. Of course they are connected to the grid.

They are connected via Space-Time Gas and Electric.

[NNadir]

17. Space-Time Gas and Electric.

If we could capture this energy we could reduce oil imports and solve the global warming problem.

[jpak]

12. It's been my experience

that personal information posted on this forum will only be used in a personal attack.

I therefore decline to participate.

sorry...