Solar Panels are Here!

Welcome to the seventh post in the series related to our solar energy project.

 Click here to start at the beginning!

 

They're here!  A big Conway Freight truck pulled up to our house on Thursday to deliver our solar array - all 2,976 pounds of it.  Good thing he had a pallet jack, because everything had to go up our steep driveway and into our garage.

 

First, we had two cardboard tubes about 12" in diameter and 14 feet long.  Each one contains 8 of the aluminum support racks that hold the solar panels. All we'll need to provide are the Schedule 40 pipes that are the vertical supports coming up from the ground. 

 

Then there were two pallets of 20 solar panels each.  We opened the boxes to look at them and the panels are actually stacked on their sides.  This makes sense if you think about how glass companies transport glass - it's stronger when it's vertical.  There was a ding in one of the boxes and a teeny little dent in the back of the first panel, but it won't be visible and won't affect the panel.  So we noted it on the shipping invoice and moved on.

 

Each 305 watt panel weighs 51.7 pounds, so we estimated each of these pallets weighed around 1,050 pounds each.  They were heavy enough that we couldn't get them up over the lip of our garage, so it's a good thing our neighbors came out to help.  It took 3 grown  men to push them off the jack and into the garage!

 

Then came the pallet with the inverters, the shut off switch, cabling, and all the other miscellaneous small stuff that we'll need to connect everything. 

 

 

Once we got everything in, it filled one entire side of our garage.  I guess I'll be parking outside until we get all this installed. 

 

The delivery driver asked what all of this stuff was and, when I told him it was our new solar array, he said "You're going to install that yourself?"  He seemed pretty incredulous.  I guess some people think we're nuts.  And maybe we are.  But really, this doesn't seem like an undo-able task to me.  A big project?  Yes. 

 

And now it's here and it's REAL.

 

I'll be back next time to talk about what's on these pallets, where we got the equipment from, and where all of it is going to go.

If you're interested in more on our solar project, please check the "Solar Project" section on the bar to the right.