Posts tagged as:

solar

Spring Electric Bill

May 3, 2018

I was pretty excited today to get my electric bill in the mail. Excited? Yes. While most people don’t ENJOY the prospect of shelling out their hard-earned cash, I installed SOLAR POWER last summer. It’s finally turned to spring in south-eastern Wisconsin, and the weather meant that I was finally producing some decent power once […]

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Spinning the PowerMeter Backwards

April 29, 2018

Spring has returned to Wisconsin. Although we had a blizzard last week, we are finally in clear skies and warming weather. In fact, it’s been almost ideal weather in my area for solar power production lately. My garage has 24 solar panels, each paired with an Enphase brand micro-inverter which can output up to 225 […]

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Solar Ammo Can

March 2, 2018

With my recent work in solar, quite a few people have started asking me about designing small BATTERY-based solar systems. I thought it would be nice to work on a project demonstrating basic solar battery charging principals, and at the same time, have a handy and useful project when I was done. Thus, the Solar […]

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Snow Rake for Solar Panels

December 11, 2017

A few days ago, we got the first snow storm of the year. Not a big deal, but that was the first snow we had since I installed the solar array on my garage. I found that using a broom, even from a ladder, I could only clear the lowest of the three rows of […]

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Snow-cover on my Solar Panels!

December 9, 2017

I woke up this morning to a gray half-light, and a blanket of snow covering everything…. including my solar panels! Hmmm. What would this do to my solar power production? To find out, I thought I would clear the snow off as many of the panels as I could and see what the difference would […]

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Solar Shading

December 6, 2017

A few weeks ago, I started noticing a shadow creeping up to the solar panels on my garage. Sure enough, in winter the sun would be low enough in the sky for the shadow of a pine tree in my front yard to start blocking solar panels! What’s a person to do?! Well, other than […]

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Sensing Current for Solar

November 13, 2017

About a week or so ago, I started playing around with a DIY current sensor. The initial experiments seemed to work, so I took it out to the garage, and hooked it up to my grid-tie solar array. I first removed the cover from my garage circuit breaker panel so that I could get to […]

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Solar REBATE Arrives!

September 11, 2017

Through the window of the envelope, I could just make out the words “PAY TO THE ORDER OF” above my name and address. Could it be? Was this finally my SOLAR REBATE CHECK!?…

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First SOLAR Electric Bill

August 4, 2017

I was pretty excited today to get my electric bill. No, I’m not usually excited to get bills in the mail, but this one was different. This will be the first electric bill with a FULL MONTH of solar production on it. Last month’s bill, which included about two weeks worth of solar power, was […]

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Game of Drones!

June 26, 2017

I’ve been wanting to get some video of the garage solar panels from a drone. However, I don’t own one, so I just threw out on social media “Hey, anyone have a drone they could bring over?” My friend, Teng, who I know through Drive Smart Wisconsin (originally Milwaukee Hybrid Group) said that his brother […]

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