Sunworshipper wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:42:25 -0700, "chaniarts"
wrote:

Sunworshipper wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:11:56 -0700, "Stu Fields"
wrote:


"chaniarts" wrote in message
...
Stu Fields wrote:
Having welding, machining, and ceramic equipment, our power bill
was getting out of hand. ( than $200/mo) We recently installed
30- 230w solar panels and now have watched our power meter go
backwards at rates up to 6sec/rev. In just a few days our panels
generated more than 200kwh and one of those days had cloud cover.
Oh and we used the solar installation to also create a car port.
It may take a few years to recover the cost, but just watching
that meter go backwards was worth quite a bit.

in may i put in a 7.5kw solar installation, just in time for the
main summer a/c season. last month's bill was $40, whereas same
month last year was $200.

the rebates covered 80%, payback is estimated at 4.5 years. panels
are guaranteed for 25 years. converter is guaranteed for 10 years.

you'll want to rinse them off occasionally. i do so about ever 3-4
weeks, as the dust builds up. cleaning will get me a 3-5% gain.

regards,
charlie
phx, az

Charlie:
Thanks for the info. We'll be watching closely the panel
production and checking for dust. Usually, we get an evening wind
that will probably keep it pretty clean. At least the wind brings
most of the loose dust around and in my garage door.

Stu


Question for both of you. If you had the option of putting those
on a tracker and having that in your yard and getting 40% more
energy or leave them static on the roof so that they are out of
sight?

one of our design requirements was invisiblity from the street. if
they pivot, they'd have to be a lot higher and not shade any of the
neighboring panels as they moved. i've seen large fields of panels
in spain that self track, but they're ground mounted.



Marketing research, love it. So a thumbs down. From the picture(s)
you could put them on one mount. BTW, was that around 8,000kb per
picture? Seemed to load awfully slow. Have you really been to Spain or
are ya taking a jab about the billion $ to Spain instead of a US
company? Thanks for the input.

SW

they were a 1mb picture when i uploaded them, i have no idea what
picturetrail did to them. i assumed that they did some sort of compression
on them.

44 panels on one mount? that would be pretty big and tall, if it had to
track both dawn and sunset. furthermore, since my house faces sw, it would
have to be in the front yard. that would definitely be a nogo by swmbo.

yes, i recently spent 1.5 weeks driving around the south of spain. they are
going big into solar cells. i saw acres of panel installations. few were
trackers; pedestal mounted for the most part. most though were fixed
inclination, looked around 25 degrees or so.