We're Solar!

We did it!  Mike from Green Earth Energy brought in an awesome crew, and the job was done by noon today, a full day before I expected everything to be complete.  They were top-notch; very knowledgeable, friendly, efficient, clean, and just a good crew all around.

Gloria and I spent the afternoon turning things on and off, and plugging things in, to see the numbers on the charge controller go up and down. In this picture, you can see that we're pulling in about 2.3kW from our 2.8kW panels, or almost full power.

I learned today that our batteries have three modes of charge- bulk (super charging), absorptive (charging, but not too much, because they're close to full), and float (just maintenance charging). It'll be fun to watch the charger to really learn how the batteries respond based on their voltage and the strength of the sun.

We ran a couple of loads of laundry today, dryer included, and discovered that sunny days can really charge our batteries back up quickly.  (We also rediscovered that a standard household dryer uses ten times as much juice as almost any other gadget we have in Camp.  The inverter jumped from about 0.46 kW with the washer running to 6.5 kW with the dryer running.)  The inverter can handle just about any load we can throw at it; our water pump, dishwasher, and dryer didn't even make it blink.  Typically, we just have a couple of lights on or a computer charging, so we usually draw less than 500 Watts of power unless we're actively doing something that requires electricity.

I've also added a few more photos of the installation to our Flikr photostream. I'm looking forward to seeing how the system performs over time, and whether we decide to add another line of batteries, or some more panels, in the future.  I'll keep you posted!