Well, it’s been just over a year since I had the solar panels turned on, and I’ve learned one important lesson:

1. Either Bella Energy did a perfect job of estimating my energy usage for the entire year, and sold me the exact right number of solar panels needed to generate that exact amount of energy I’d use, or
2. Wholesale energy is very, very cheap 

Xcel Rebate

The reason I know this? Here’s the rebate check for the entire year of 2009, in which I sold energy back to XcelEnergy. A whopping $6.15. Now granted, when I started last year, my “net meter” started at “zero” and was running at below zero for the whole year, and I’m at about -100 now, but I was stunned at how close to “zero” usage I ended up.

I’m not complaining… Having monthly electric bills of $7.00 (just for the connection to the grid), and this rebate means my “out of pocket” for the entire year was roughly $75 bucks was absolutely worth it. At the current rate, the whole system should pay for itself in about 7 or 8 years. And that’s if Xcel doesn’t raise the rates for electricity.

All in all, I’m very happy I did this…

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The latest update in the “Greening” effort was to replace my old X10 Thermostat (TXB-16) with a new Venstar T1800 7 day programmable thermostat, and then hook up an INSTEON adapter to it that will let a product called Indigo on my home control computer run it.

By itself, the new thermostat is considerably more powerful than the TXB-16 was, and with Indigo I can do much more. And in a rare example of me actually planning “forward”, it will support the dual-zone, multi-stage furnace/AC I want to put it next year to replace the again, cheap, and highly inefficient York furnace they put in the house when it was built.

The installation wasn’t too hard but I found out that the house builder had not really connected all the control wires in the furnace/AC control ( but at least they didn’t clip the wires they didn’t use). They just left ‘em hanging inside the furnace. A little crawling around in the dust and all that razor sharp sheet metal connecting all the wiring, and voila!  All told, the whole upgrade took about an hour, including programming.

And, my favorite part ? The Solar System doesn’t interfere with the new INSTEON communication method (on both electrical wires and RF boosted)… Finally, I have control of my house temperature back under computer control. It only took me 11 months to do it…

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Live View

My green home upgrade continues with the addition of a product from a company name The Energy Detective called TED 5000. Basically this is a meter that let’s me keep an eye on energy usage with both the feed from Xcelenergy (the power company here) and my solar panels. It’s something only a guy could love (the geeky graphs and huge amounts of data), but on the side, also lets me know, down to the watt, what each device in the house is using.  I’ve attached a couple more “sample pictures” after the break below.

It has a “live mode” (the picture on the left) where I can watch real time as I turn on things like:

• TV (100-600 watts, depending on if it’s displaying a predominantly black or white screen)
• Clothes Dryer (a scary 6,300+ watts)
• Oven (2,500 watts) and burners (2,800 watts each) [which explains why I don't cook!]
• The furnace (1,100 watts for the blower motor) [which explains why I keep the house at 64 degrees day, and 55 night]

I haven’t gone around measuring everything yet, but may do something like that over the long weekend. I’m really curious how much energy all the little power bricks I have for all the little devices take. I’m betting it’s going to be a surprising number.

The company still has some work to do on the software that comes with the product (quite a few minor bugs, and a couple major ones (like mis-labeling outputs on graphs). The appear totally overwhelmed by the popularity of their products, and are trying to ramp up support, but they’re not there yet. Be prepared to be “on your own” for a while. But, for the most part, it works OK, and provides information I simply didn’t have before.

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Panels from the North East

I finally made the decision to jump into some home improvements, one of which is putting a Solar PV array (Photo-voltaic) on the roof. I’m not home enough to benefit from solar heating, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I can end up with zero electricity bills at the end of each year.

Ali, a friend of mine, works at Conergy (a world-wide solar wholesale/distributor) and recommended that I talk to Bella Energy, an local installer who they work with often. I contacted Bella, and ended up purchasing a system from them (contact me for a reference if you’re interested).

For an east-facing roof (mine faces due east), I should expect to get about 77% of the efficiency of a south facing roof, which really surprised me. Apparently the panels work much better when cold (in the morning) than when warm (west-facing in the afternoon).

The market is getting a little crazy, what with rebates from the local electric company, and the recently changed law that gives you a 30% tax credit (of course, you pay income tax on the tax credit) so it’s really more like a 20% credit. The net cost to the consumer, after the rebate and the credit, is only about 30% of the price of the system. Given my “history” of electricity usage, I should be able to pay for the system in about 8-10 years, and that’s if the price of electricity doesn’t change at all (yeah, right).

The installers came out and had the whole thing installed in under 3 days, but won’t actually “hook it up” until after the first of the year, so that I can get the new tax credit (it went from a $2,000 credit to a 30% credit). The city will be doing their inspection soon, Xcelenergy will come install a “reversable electric meter”, and then we’ll fire up the whole thing in January. Below the break are some pictures of what it looks like, and a more detailed description of “what” was installed.

[edited on 11/24/2008] – I added some photos from the neighbors roof today.

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