Solar Power

It occurred to me last night that I’d never updated on this.  We got notice a couple weeks ago that “the audit is complete and the file closed”.  Which appears to be legalese for “ok, you passed, this time, don’t screw up again”.

For anyone reading this consider this your warning.  If you install solar panels (or other tax rebated forms of energy production) remember to keep all your files for it in the same place!

Don’t get me wrong, we mostly had saved the paperwork, repeated in multiple spots.  Part of the problem was that what the audit paperwork called a couple things and what the title on the actual forms said wasn’t quite the same, and I ended up having to call into to the auditor to make sure I had the right stuff.

The other problem was that we couldn’t find proof of how much we actually paid.  I know we got receipts, but god be dammed if I could find them!  So that meant tracking down the checks with the bank.  SHOULD have been fairly simple.  But the one bank account that we’d used, we ended up closing a year later.  So we no longer had access to the account online to just go back and pull up the checks.  It necessitated a trip to an actual branch for Husband, which is difficult on his schedule, to actually talk to someone who could check his ID and do a search.  Then we hit computer problems.  Not our computers, the bank computers.  The third and final check was paid out at the end of Sept of that year, and for some reason the bank’s system was refusing to access that month’s info.  It took several weeks, and several trips, and several phone calls, to finally get a copy of that check.

So here’s your warning!  When you pay for the panels, SAVE the RECEIPT with the rest of the paperwork.  And while you’re at it, get a copy of the canceled check(s), and/or your credit card statement showing the charge, and save that WITH the receipts.  Trust me, it’ll come in handy!

As for us, we made EXTRA copies of everything, including all the checks, and tucked those copies in with everything else.  Cause if I’m reading the tax paperwork right, the Fed’s have another 4years in which to decide to audit us too…..

When we first put in the solar panels I’d intended to try to update here regularly with what our energy production was.  Yah, that didn’t happen.

But here’s a screenshot of the lifetime graph for our energy production as of this morning:

I’d have to go dig through the files to tell you exactly how much thats saved us in costs from the power company, but I can tell you that in the summer our bills, even when we’re running the central air, are pretty close to half what they were before.  Keep in mind that the upstate area tends to be very cloudy, we don’t get a whole lot of very sunny days here in comparison to the rest of the continental USA. However that side of the house gets very little shade.

We’ve got a few more “around the house” projects that need to be done in the next couple years, important things like putting gutters on the house so that the rain will stop screwing with the foundation, and then we’re going to look at adding to the number of panels and adding a battery backup system.  Our goal is to eventually be able to use this as a backup generator that doesn’t require us to stockpile fuel.

So in our first 7 days of having the solar panels on it rained at least some every day….but we managed to generate 47.7kWh anyway, so I’ll take it.

(if you click on the picture to see it big you’ll see a face peering out the door trying to figure out what I was doing)

The install finished last Friday.  Today the power company came out and swapped out the meter for one that will role backwards, and we turned on the panels.  Course, its raining today, with a pretty heavy cloud cover.  But they’re pulling in some power anyway, just from the ambient light.  Currently the monitor says 30-31wh per panel.

Right now this is just a standard grid tie system.  Eventually our intention is to put in a battery back up system, but that’ll have to wait a couple years probly.

I’m going to try to make this a regular thing, to report on what we’re getting for power in (basically the sort of thing I was trying to find when doing my own research). 

In that spirit, here’s the upfront information on this:

This is 16 250w Solar World Monocrystalline panels, with 16 Enphase micro-inverters.

Full cost, including labor: $18,000

NYSERDA 2012 incentive:-$6,000

County incentive: -$2,000

Our upfront cost: $10,000

Federal tax rebate: -$3,000

NY state tax rebate: -$2,500

Our total cost after tax rebates: $4,500

I posted, way back shortly after starting this blog, about a company called Clarian Power, which was attempting to produce less expensive, “plug n play,” solar and wind power systems for the average consumer.  Their products were decidedly interesting and I’d been keeping an eye on them for a while.  They were hoping to have product on the market by the end of this year.

So, today, with all the news about “green power” companies going under I decided to hit Clarian’s website to see if there’d been any updates.  Except the website has changed.  The link now auto redirects to www.clarianlabs.com which doesn’t have any information on it except a “contact us” button.  I can get around that new front page by typing in www.clarianpower.com/solar.html and see the originial website, but there’ve been no updates.  Well, that’s not cool, but hey, I was following their Facebook site, and now that I think about it there haven’t been any updates from that for a while either, but lets go check.  Except there’s no Facebook site any more either.  Under either the Clarian Power name, or the Clarian Labs name, and its not listed as a page I’m following any more.

Well f*ck.  Hit Google, nothing really comes up there either.  Links to past articles about the solar and wind projects, an article about a “new” project (dated a few months ago), and thats it.  Nothing about this being one of the companies thats closing, nothing.  So I don’t KNOW that something bad has happened to them, but the lack of anything anywhere is not promising!