Hooray! The sun is shining today.

So, the installers were able to climb up on our roof to install our new solar panel array. These people mix electrical engineering and solar engineering with mountaineering!

The team at Lightning Energy has been great. Thanks to Andrew for providing a detailed quote and updating it along the way to match my requests and questions. Thanks to the installation team for their professionalism and attention to detail. They were also kind enough to lend me some muscle here and there to help move a couple of things into the house from the garage. Special thanks to Caitlin for staying behind and coming back later to sort out a technical hitch with the power output being unnecessarily capped. We had a funny chat on the Enphase Energy tech support line with a self described “dumb blonde from Ohio” who flicked some magic software switches to make it all work. Not so dumb after all 😉.

Geeky details:

11.88 kW = 27 x 440W Jinko Solar Tiger Neo solar panels
27 Enphase IQ8AC-72-M-INT micro inverters

We opted for this more expensive option because each panel has its own micro-inverter, which means that if one or two panels are shaded, only those are reduced in power, while the others produce their maximum power. We can also see the output of each panel so we can identify any issues, such as poor performance or if one gets covered with lichen.

I wanted to put as many panels as we could on the north-west facing roof, and was originally quoted for 34 panels (almost 15kW). But AusNet (our region’s distributor) limited it to about 11kW, so we had to downsize the project. This was disappointing and I wish it had come up earlier in the proposal process. My intention was to oversize, so that on cloudy days and in short winter daylight, the reduced production would still be enough for all our needs. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve moved the old 2.5kW solar system and inverter to the shed, for a possible future project.

After the installation was finished, they had to turn off the system, to wait for an inspector to come out to check it out and turn it on. This could take several more weeks 😢. All that sunshine power going to waste in the mean time.