I have had my two solar panels in the driveway getting power every day since June. My plan was to eventually put them on the roof if they worked (which they do) but it would require a building permit and I didn’t want to do it during the summer when it was too hot on the roof and in the attic where I would be running cables. I also had to request permission from the historic preservation board. Their main concern was whether it would be visible from the street or by neighbors and for the most part it is not. Not long after that I got a building permit, but I still have to get the work inspected, which may not go well since there are a ton of rules about rooftop solar installations, though most of that is because people are generating thousands of watts instead of hundreds like me. Plus those big installation tie into the grid or at least the home electrical panel and mine does not since it just powers a battery and I run stuff from the battery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
I got the building permit on Friday but had stuff going on over the weekend, but I had been buying everything I needed over the last month or two. I was going to need more DC cable, mounts for the roof, roofing screws for the mounting brackets, roofing sealant, grounding wire, grounding brackets to attach the wire to the panels, another attachment for the wire to a copper pipe, and a MC4 connecter crimper so I could run plain cables through smaller openings and then attach a connector on the end of the wire. I had run some coax cable down from the attic for an antenna and a satellite dish into an outlet in the living room, so I was going to replace that with the positive and negative DC cables. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A big problem was how to get the panels up to the roof. They are big, about 6 feet by 4 feet and over 50 pounds, so awkward and not easy to carry on flat ground. I thought about using ropes to pull them up or getting some help, but I am all out of brothers at the moment. Instead I used two long pieces of old wooden siding and connected them with a screw at one end to make an inverted V. Then I put a board across about 5 feet up to complete the A. I could lean the A against a low part of the roof and lift a panel up so it would rest on the cross board. Then it was high enough that the top was above the gutter and I could pull it up from the roof. Still wasn’t easy, but it worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other hard thing was installing the mounts. There were six pieces of rail that I needed to attach at just the right location and it was important that they be placed so that I could screw them down though the roof and into a rafter. So the hard thing to know is where the rafter is. Using the chimney as a known point above and below the roof, I figured I would have a good chance, but the chimney construction in the attic doesn’t have the same bricks as the exterior, so I missed the first rafter by an inch. I backed that screw out and blistered on a length of 2×4 held in place with screws so that when I put the screw back in place now it would bite into the 2×4. Once I had that, I could measure rafter spacings in the attic to get the other 5 in the right place (well, 4 of the 5). The rails sit on a piece of rubber to make a good seal and the screws also have a rubber washer. I also coated the bottom well in roofing sealant and backed out the screws and squirted some sealant into the holes to hopefully seal the layers of shingles and sheeting. No rain the forecast, so I should be good for a week anyway. Everything worked out really well where I didn’t have to cross a lip of the shingles in order to put a rain in and the rails are only 5″ long while the reveal on a shingle is 5.5″. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first two brackets were pretty hard so that is where stopped work on Monday, but on Tuesday afternoon I wanted to do the other 4 mounts, install the panels and get the wiring so it would be ready for sunrise. By sunset I had the panels in place and ran the cables through the ridge vent down into the attic. Then at night I was able to take out the old coax cables, and cut some DC cords to length and crimp on MC4 connectors for the first time. I’m not finished. I need to run the grounding wire and zip tie some of the cables to the panels and I need to do something with the old coax outlet that now has DC cables coming out of it. And I think I want to run a line from the living room outlet into the crawlspace and back up into the kitchen where I would like to keep the Aferiy battery so it can power the refrigerator. In the Summer having it in the living room was great becasue it could power the window air conditioner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have had my two solar panels in the driveway getting power every day since June. My plan was to eventually put them on the roof if they worked (which they do) but it would require a building permit and I didn’t want to do it during the summer when it was too hot on … Continue reading “Rooftop Solar”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5053"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5055,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5053\/revisions\/5055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}