Energy

In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.

- Lee Iacocca -

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Tomorrow is the last day of winter for the year. It's been a little more dour than usual and has seeped deep into my ancient dinosaur bones and sapped away my energy.

It's been a grind over the last three months after taking on a role with a new company and, whilst the efforts I've invested have paid dividends, I've also paid a price. All work and no play is a bad fucken combination, but all work and no play with shitty winter weather is far worse.

We'll start to see longer days though, much more blue sky, less rain and the temperatures will rise sharply and along with it will come more opportunity for outdoor activities. For me, that means wilderness, far away places and nature! I've got another reason for less clouds and longer days though, not just the fact it allows me to get more active and feel like I have more energy but because...I can get more energy! I mean more other energy.

A while back I wrote about a solar system initiative the government have on offer at the moment. You can read that post here, but essentially it means free solar systems. The offer was for a 4.5kW system but I chose to upgrade to a 6.0kW system which has cost me an additional $400...so not totally free - I think it's smart to upgrade as I plan to add a Tesla battery down the track and the additional energy production will work nicely. It's a good deal right?

A few weeks ago I signed the paperwork and have been waiting for the installation team to get in contact and today they did so. My installation is happening tomorrow. The installation will take about half a day and because I work from home mostly I'll be around throughout.

I have a solar system on my other house and chose the best quality equipment I could afford and have been happy with it. With the government scheme I was a little concerned the hardware might be rubbish so I did some additional research. As it turns out, it isn't rubbish at all, which made me feel a little better about it.

The solar collectors are by Risen Jager and are 375W panels, 16 of them. They have a 15 year product warranty and 25 year linear performance warranty. I'm not impressed with them being from a Chinese company but there's not much choice really.

The inverter is by Austrian company Fronius International. That's Austria folks, not to be confused with Australia. It has 5,000W of inverter power and a 5 + 5 years warranty. (The extra 5 years is for a product that is registered, which is what I'll do of course.)

The array will be mounted to the roof on brackets, as per normal, and sit at the same angle as the roof so they don't stick out and looked fucked up. It will be split across various roof locations to account for roof profile and to maximise solar collection as the sun traverses the sky.

I'm looking forward to seeing the numbers once it's up and running; there's an app to track the energy production which you can see above. The images and numbers relate to the system on my other house of course.

In my head the process will go smoothly tomorrow and no one will fall off the roof, and if they do hopefully they bounce. Seriously though, there is a chance some roof tiles will be broken and I've planned ahead for that adding some additional spares, to the several I already had, a couple weeks ago. The company doing the installation are reputable though so I'm not expecting problems and feel quite confident.

I'll do a report now and then and share how my energy bill reduces. At my other house it came down by about 85% which is significant considering the cost of power here in Australia. I'm hoping for the same result.

Having a solar system, without storage capabilities, means some changes to how power is used but they're easy changes to make, and I think the effort will prove worthwhile. Using power during the day when the panels are producing energy will will mean power savings for me and when I'm not using it the power-to-grid aspect helps mitigate the effect society has on the environment. It seems like a good deal.