Exploring Solar

This past May my wife and I finally pulled the trigger and bought what we intend to be our “forever home.” We’d been looking for several years, and just had never found the right house, in the right place, at the right price. We ended up with a ~1,700ft² house just outside of Port Townsend, WA, in a newly-constructed development. It’s all one level, on just over a quarter of an acre of land, with a nice back patio and flat yard for the dog, and has a three car garage - …

In the first post of this series, I laid out my general reasoning and plan for incorporating solar power into my new home. This post will go into more detail about what that means in theory, and how it plays out in practice. There are five general types of systems to consider when having a discussion about electric service with and without Solar power (and/or battery storage): Electrical Grid Only - This is the configuration of the vast majority of residences and businesses. Power is provided …

In the first and second posts of this series, I laid out my general reasoning and plan for incorporating solar power into my new home and covered the basics of solar power systems and integrated batteries. This post will go into more detail about the choices we’ve made regarding our solar installation. Details about our battery system choices will be in the next post of the series. Let’s recap the original goals for our solar+battery system: Have enough solar capacity to reach annual …

In the third part of this series, I provided detail about the solar panel array that we plan to have installed on the roof of our new home. In this post I’ll provide a very quick update on that, based on new information that we gathered during the on-site survey by the installer. The installer did a follow-up site survey mid last month, and unfortunately came to the conclusion that our roof space wasn’t quite sufficient to handle 24 panels on the south face, or 6 panels on the east …

This installment is way overdue, but better late than never! In the third and fourth parts of this series, I provided detail about the solar panel array that we planned to have installed on the roof of our new home. In this post I’ll describe how we structured the decision process for the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) portion of the installation, and which one we picked. Everything is installed and operating now, so the next installment will be an update about the installation …