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Issue #210 January 2008
INTELLIGENT ENERGY SOLUTIONS
Solar-Powering the Circuit Cellar
Part 2: From the Ground Up
by Steve Ciarcia
Last month, Steve began describing the process of installing his solar PV system. This month, he covers the massive task of preparing two 11¢ schedule 80 poles (8² in diameter) to support two of the three solar arrays. As you’ll see, it’s easier said than done. The technical adventure continues!
Start | Problem Solved | Pole Mounts | Under Construction | Success at Last | Sources & PDF
A hazard of conceiving a big project when you are a thousand miles away from home is that it often leads to overconfidence about the ease of actually accomplishing it. As with all of my projects these days, it turns into a bigger mess the instant I pick up a shovel.
For as much talk as there is in all the media about solar electricity, the real number of residential installations as a percentage of the houses in any state is statistically infinitesimal. I think I mentioned in an editorial that when I signed the dotted line for my PV system there were only 152 existing residential PV installations in the entire state of Connecticut (population 3.5 million). I doubt it has increased by 30% in the intervening months it has taken to install mine. Certainly, mainstream PV interest is there, but the Connecticut rebate program takes relatively deep pockets to participate. I state this as a reality, not a criticism. I love reading home-grown PV construction articles where the whole family participates in converting the $8,000 made from selling their old vacation RV into a 4-kW home-built roof-mounted solar system.
I hate to admit it (especially to the wife), but I may not have jumped on the PV bandwagon and glued solar panels on every south-facing surface around here so quickly if the Connecticut rebate program didn’t make it impossible for me to home-brew my own PV system. I know it sounds incongruous, but let me explain.
I’ve become a bit more pragmatic in my old age, but old habits die hard. I spent many years rolling my own solutions. If there was a technical problem, I thought nothing of spending any amount of time and effort building interfaces or installing equipment to solve the problem. I didn’t put any value on my labor or look at that time as lost to other pursuits because it was all about the adventure of solving the task. Obviously, that cultural imperative isn’t that alien because it seems that all of you have been following me down the same path in Circuit Cellar for many years.
This technical adventure provides further satisfaction when it does things like convert $2 worth of junk box parts into a $1,000 commercial function or make $5,000 worth of scrounged PV components into the equivalent of a $20,000 professionally installed system. The bad news is the feeling we adventurers get when we know we have the expertise to build something very significant (saving lots of money by doing it ourselves) but never get off square one to do it because we know it is such a big job. That was my PV system dilemma.
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