Residential Solar, part 4

My previous posts about this project are part 1, part 2, and part 3.

It is August 2023. The roofers finished reinstalling the concrete tiles over the new underlayment in time for us to safely withstand the heavy rain brought by Tropical Storm Hilary. The city inspector signed off on the work, without climbing the ladder that the roofers had provided. We were clear to schedule the installation of the solar panels, and got slotted in for the next day.

We decided to use the ladder before the roofers came to retrieve it, to inspect the gutters. They were completely blocked by debris, including a soft drink bottle, pieces of roofing tile, nails, tacks, and scraps of all sorts. We cleaned about 30 pounds of this mess into 3 trash bags, and called the roofer to come back and clear out the gutter on the side of the house, that is too high for us to safely do ourselves.

We also pointed out to the roofer representative some places where we thought the workmanship was substandard. To his credit, he listened courteously and agreed to have workers return to clean the high gutter and make fixes. I gave him the final payment for the roof work, trusting him to keep his promise. Since they haven’t come back yet, that will go into a future post.

The solar installation crew came early on the appointed day. In one very long day, they installed all the 17 solar panels, the battery box, new circuit box, and master switch box, and did all the attendant electrical work, painting, and cleanup. They even scrubbed a white streak of unknown origin off the front walk, despite not believing they had caused it. They broke a few tiles, and replaced them with surplus the roofers had left.

The solar equipment is supposed to use Wi-Fi to enable us to monitor it from an app on our phones. The installer said the Wi-Fi was too weak, but that would be addressed by adding a Wi-Fi extender for final inspection. Our car in the garage connects to our Wi-Fi just fine, but it has one fewer walls between it and the router.

We are not allowed to turn on the master switch that will power our house from our solar panels until the installation passes a final city inspection and gets approval from our electric utility, which is Southern California Edison. We hear that our city is rather slow to do this, but that 70-120 days should suffice. So we expect to have it fully operational by the end of 2023.