2018 July

Time for an update. In total I have replaced 12 inverters under warranty. I had 3 inverters replaced before last year. 4 last year and 5 this year. 15 year warranty on these.  Had some fun last year. Enphase would not send me warranty replacement inverters. As I was just the owner. I had to use a qualified contractor. This cost me over $300.00 and he failed to collect serial numbers to update my web page at enphase. And didn't re-scan the envoy communicator for new inverters when done. Therefore my graphic did not show those panels. And he stopped responding to my phone calls or e-mails. I can not find any dealers for enphase in my area either. So I phoned enphase again and talked them into helping me by send the replacement units. So with the help of a couple of friends we replaced the bad units. I then covered up last years replacement panels 1 at a time. Then watching the production reports I can associate the correct serial number with each panel. this let me update my Enphase graphic for both years.

Everything is up and running again. Performance is a little down but respectable. Here is my chart.

This is annual totals in Kilo Watts

2014

Hi everyone. Sorry for the long dry spell. Everything has been up and running steady. I average about 3 times a year that I need to go up and clean the snow off. Have this down to about 20 minutes on a sunny day. It does make a difference. Mostly December and January. By February the sun is warm enough to melt it off.

Biggest question I get is would I do it again. Under the same conditions I would definitely say yes. The income I will get on it once it has been paid off will just fill in the income I need at retirement. But today. The contract they offer is a lot less money. I can understand that as it cost me 9$ a watt for my system and it can be done for half that now. So the income would be half. Still, its the right thing to do.

Here is the latest tracking. Still matching predictions.

2012 Tracking

Hi Folks

Still at it. New chart now. Looks Like we are doing OK. This winter a bit better but bad Ice storm in January.

I will update regular so stay tuned.

2nd anniversary
Had 2 months that beat projections. Nice to see it on the largest months of the year.
We have been able to lower our Insurance costs to about $260 annual payment. A lot more reasonable.
Here is the new chart.

Cheers

After a year of production.

Not to much more to tell. Here is the latest readings.

Removing the partial  from 1st month, I have a 1 years production at 10615 Kilowatts.
This gives me a financial payment of $8513.20. for the year. Of course Hydro charges me $6 a month to read the meter. And insurance is still costing $750 a year. This gives me a return after 1 year at $7691.20 or 9%
Not the 11.39% I had calculated and hoped for in the beginning, but still not a bad return. And with the improvements I should have a better winter. Hope you all do too.

Cheers

Inverter repair job

OK now the numbers are looking a little better. We had an inverter die on us in June. This put me 1 panel down. That's a 2% reduction in output, so we would have made projection if it was working in July.

Now fixing it wasn't easy. I sent the installer a note. System has not been running for a year yet. He responded by telling me that he had been having trouble dealing with Enphase, so I was on my own. Not exactly the response I was hoping for. Anyway I phoned the Enphase help line. Waited for an hour and a half to talk to a live body. He was disappointed that I had already swapped the inverter with another location said that I should not do this on my own. Don't understand why not. Not a fun job but it can be done.

 He said he would put a request for a RMA number in. Then I waited a week. No info from them at all. I then sent an e-mail to every address I could find for them. 2 days later I finally got a response that a ticket number had been generated. That's all they said. Didn't know what that meant. But 2 days later I received a new inverter in the mail. Complete with a return postage for purolator. Put it up that night. Then I took my sheet with the Mac address numbers and updated it with the new locations of the 2 inverters. The one I originally swapped and the location of the new one. Sent the the new information to the Enphase web site. 2 days later and web page is back up and running fine. Whole thing took about 5 weeks. 

While I was up on the roof. I decided to get ready for next winter. Had a problem with the snow not coming off by itself. One main reason is that there is a gap between the rows of panels.

When the snow slides off of the top panel it gets stuck on the gap to the next one. Then it freezes on at night and you won't get it off until a warm day. And then the panel won't produce. It's dark after 5:00 here so I really didn't want to remove the snow until the weekend. When I could see what I am doing. This problem really reduces the system output. So I moved the panels together. This should help. Next I stated cutting off the bolts. They are all sticking up.

I bought snow rake last year. It is made of plastic so it won't scratch the panels. But it gets caught on every stud that is sticking up. So I took each one off and cut it to size.

This should work a lot better. We will let you know. 

So September is coming. When it is complete I will have been running for 1 year. I will give you a report on what the return on investment is at that time. So see you later.

2011 Tracking

Again same chart as before. Green area is the predicted output for the Back and Garage Panel arrays.Dark blue area is the recording of Kilo Watt Hours as per Enphase recording from the inverters.Light blue readings is the reading from the Ontario Hydro Meter. % of forecast is comparison from the PvWatts program and the actual Hydro meter.

Please return to this chart as I will be updating each month as the readings come in.

So stay tuned.

2010 Wrap up

Well December was a little disappointing. Check out my updated chart.

As this shows we only made 45.94 % of my forecast. Not good. So I checked my Enphase site, and checked on Dec 27th.

This was a clear cloudless day, so why is the output so erratic? Just need to look in the back yard.



Although trees are good for the planet, they are not so good for solar power production. As this month has the shortests days in the year, it also has the sun lower in the sky then any other month. I just hope it doesn't affect January too much.