Heres a short update. I ended up removing over 50 trees around the house and garage where the panels are mounted. I think that really helped. Not that the panels were totally shaded. just gets the light on them earlier in the morning and keeps it lit later in the afternoon. This time of the year its getting 10 hours of light with 4-5 hours of peak performance. Last month our bill was 38.00 and we were only a few days worth of power short of totally covering our usage. This month the only charge was for "facility's" which is the cost of having the meter and connection for 25+ tax. there is an extra 62Kw overage that will be banked for future use. Heres a copy of this months bill
I like the concept from a cost and maybe an environmental standpoint (?), but am more interested from a survivalist perspective - If the actual electrical grid were to go down (it's very susceptible to attack), I assume the solar power would be fine, especially with a battery bank to store power. Someone told me that wasn't the case, but I don't see how it couldn't be. In a true crisis, I'd think one could unhook the wires coming off the grid if need be and be self sufficient.
Google the Tesla Powerwall. I suspect that it might be expensive, but purchase enough units and you probably could run your house indefinitely. Perhaps not in Seattle or in Juneau Alaska, but in most normal (regarding cloudy/rainy) places. The Powerwall will transfer power from the grid to battery backup instantly. According to Tesla, the transfer is so fast that you won't know that it has switched.
The way the inverter works is it has to "See Power" as in be connected to a power source to make power. Right now if the power goes out im in the dark too. They say not to use a generator. someting about dirty power messing up the inverter. Im betting and will look more into it that I can use a 12v battery and an inverter to fool it into thinking its still connected and at least have incoming power during the day. I looked into this and it would cost me over 17K with a 10 yr life span on the battery packs. The math dont work for me to spend that much and then have to replace it in 10 years. I read something about refurbishing fork lift batteries and using them to store DC power for a very realistic cost.
That seems crazy that if the power goes out that you're in the dark on solar. I don't know enough about how it works, but there's got to be a way around that. I can't imagine, especially where you are (FL, IIRC) where power could easily be out for a week or more, that being self-sufficient, even if only during the day w/o the ability to store that power, wouldn't be a huge selling point of going solar.
