May I pick your brain?
What brand of panel is that?
Did you do the labor?
What is the cost of your setup? How many kw is it? How many hours of usable sun do you get?
Do you use batteries for storage? Are you on grid to? Do you send excess to the grid?
I built all of those panels myself from loose mono cells.
The panels are the cheap part of a Solar system. The expensive part are the inverters, charge controllers and batteries.
The easiest way to start for a do it your-selfer like me was to build a simple 100W panel. Buy a 15A charge controller, 2 x 12Volt deep discharge marine batteries, and a 12/120V inverter of about 1000 Watts. What I did was pull a light circuit for my basement off of the breaker box and just hooked it to the inverter and played with that setup for a while. Once you start playing with the system you realize its like a daisy chain, just keep adding panels to the chain until you max out one of your components, upgrade that component and just keep adding. Before I knew it I had half of my home connected to the system and was actually seeing results on my electric bill. Things just gradually grew from there.
Got on the grid, smart meter, get sent a check from the power company every month because I produce more than I use. Use to have panels on my south facing roof, but have a Solar water heater there now. Solar panels require you to clean them every few weeks to get the most out of them. Water and a squeegee are all you need, but being on the roof is a risk that I don't take at age 56, so its down on the ground with servos that move the panels to face the sun all year no mater where the sun is in the sky.
If you can solder and know the difference between DC/AC positive negative and ground, then you won't have any problems.
Installing it all myself and making the panels myself probably saved my 70% of the cost. The biggest cost of any system is the installation. I had a City electrician friend of mine hook me up to the Utility, that had to be permitted and checked off so it cost over $2,000 for everything including parts. I already made that back in checks from the utility, but won't actually recoup my entire PV array cost until 2021, by then I will have another 20 years of usage out of the original panels to go.
I have something that 99.8% of the US population does not have.
Large tracts of land in excess of 1,000 acres.
I figured If I built all my panels myself, and got more equipment and did all the work myself. I could build a 1GigaWatt PV Array and the utility could send me a check for a Million + every week.
I have a lake cabin we don't use very much, and I put a 10K watt array on its roof, but with no battery backup in it and had it hooked to the grid too. Since we only use the place maybe 2 weeks out of each year, its been collecting a $120 check each month for almost 2 years now, adds up over time and makes a simple home which requires maintenance almost pay for itself.
If you gotta pay some guy to do all the work and sell you the panels, instead of a 10 year payoff, you'r looking at 23-26 years.
Gotta replace all the batteries every 5 years. For me the batteries alone are $3300. Battery tech REALLY needs to come a long way to solve some of the problems a totally independent system has.
