Solar Power For Homes – Time to Turn It On

The day has come. We are good to go. We got an email from PG&E, our utility provider, saying they had inspected and signed off on our solar power system installation done by our friends at Solar City. Following close on that email’s heals was the official word from Solar City saying we were good to turn on our system.

It is a simple process but I still printed out the instructions for powering up the system and read them over a few times, not wanting make any mistakes and all. Turns out it is super easy and I may have worried too much, but better safe than sorry eh?

I installed the network monitoring device to my internet broadband setup so we can monitor our output of solar energy and so Solar City can monitor the system to make sure it is working properly.

Then I went out side and flipped the breakers on the inverter box for our solar system, then the breaker on our main electrical panel, and finally the electric ac/dc disconnect breaker next to our inverter.

The Solar City system power up instructions:

To Turn Your System On and Off:
(To turn off your system, follow these steps in reverse order.)
1. Locate your inverter(s) similar to the ones pictured Below. Turn on the inverter by flipping the AC/DC Disconnect switch(es) to the ON position. The inverter should be the first step in turning on your system and the last step in turning off your system. If you have multiple inverters, the order in which you switch the inverters on or off does not matter.

2. Locate the main electrical service panel similar to the image on the next page. It should be mounted on an external or garage wall. The switches on the front of the panel are called breakers. Turn on the breakers labeled “Solar System”, “PV”, “Photovoltaic Backfeed” or “SolarCity”. Some customers have an additional sub-panel. If this applies to you, please switch on the breakers for the solar system on both the main and sub-panel.

3. Some systems have external AC and DC disconnects similar to those depicted at right. If your system has one or both of these, then switch the handles to the ON position.

We are live. However the big irony today is that it is stormy and dark today with a big nasty winter storm rolling through on this December day. So not sure we will be generating very much solar power today but as soon as the clouds roll out we will be pulling juice out of the suns rays.

So solar power for homes and in particular our home is now a reality thanks to the solar power leasing arrangements we made with Solar City. We started this process over a year ago and the time frame got massively delayed but the economic crunch that hit our country but we still feel very good about doing this and adding solar to our home. Now that the funding is available to companies like Solar City and others to offer these leasing deals many more homeowners will be able to install solar power on their homes. It should not take nearly as long to get the system installed going forward and therefore the hurdles to going solar are reducing.

I would highly recommend homeowners look into adding solar to their homes as a viable way to offset some or all of their electrical power consumption and to contribute top the efforts to reduce global warming and fossil fuels consumption.