Sunny Days Ahead

• Filling Out Our New Solar Economy July 16, 2011
  Since we have completed our PV expansion a few weeks ago, we have been piling up the KWh credits on our grid meter. According to our predictions, we could generate a surplus of 5 MWh (5000KWh) over the course of a year. This was no accident but a strategy to replace conventional fuels with solar power.The main appliance we obtained was a high efficiency heat […]
• Alternative Solar Mounting; POWERHOUSE June 13, 2011
  Many sites we visit to make a PV assessment have the house roof either facing the wrong way or is too shallow of a roof pitch. When the roof of the house or outbuilding is out of the running, ground mounting is a common solution. It can be a top of pole mount or a linear structure. In any event, factory made ground mounts are always much more expensive than […]
• Solar is Growing in West Virginia June 13, 2011
  Most people think solar won't work well in West Virginia. The fact of the matter is that WV has better solar irradiance than the Great Lakes states, New England, and even Germany which is the most PV developed country in the world.If you go to the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and look at their OpenPV site, you can click on any state and see the […]
• PV Upgrade Finally Done May 31, 2011
  A few months ago, I posted about our plans to add on to our home PV system. This spring has been the most rainy one I've seen in a while. Needless to say, progress was slow on construction. Add to that a couple customer PV installs, and I'm amazed it is done at all.Anyway, we added over 4kw to our existing 3.6kw. The design of the mount was a proto […]