The Accidental Weblog

You can thank Eamon and me for the cold weather and snow scheduled for next weekend - we finally got all the preliminary work done and government hoops jumped through, so we will be outside all day next Saturday installing PV solar panels, and while it might be great weather for snowsports, it’s not going to be as much fun to fumble frozen-fingered assembling nuts+bolts+wires. Hope you appreciate the sacrifice - sorry we waited so long.

Quite. Thankee indeed…

But if I understand this correctly, if you were to do your panels in August, we’d probably have enough base by mid September?

Hrm… What’s it worth to you?

Seriously, also cool to hear you’re doing these. We’d considered ‘em a few years back, but the price was crazy. Is it getting saner?

If we had done our panels in August, it would have rained while we were installing them, and for the next 3-4 weeks thereafter.

As for the price, the recent MicroFIT program pays small generators $0.802/kWh for PV (FIT=Feed-In Tariff - http://microfit.powerauthor…). For my 2.6kW system, we will have about a 10 year payback period - this is a bonus, since when we started, the rate was supposed to be $0.42. The price has come down a lot in the past few years, and we have an advantage that we are doing a lot of the work ourselves, and we are lucky to have a house at the top of a crescent with a clear southern exposure.