Standing barefoot on the cold cement floor of my garage, staring at the display on my inverter, I watched in anticipation as the voltage of the solar array climbed slowly until it reached the threshold of the inverter's power-on circuit. CLICK.... The inverter switched on and started to blink. A few minutes later, CLICK.... HUM..... and the inverter started feeding power to the grid.
Here is my account as recorded on Facebook as it happened:
November 12 8:01am:
Cloudy sunrise: watching my inverter start to convert power to run my house. 34watts.... 57watts..... 64watts... 87watts... 94watts..... 106watts. I'm just geeking out here!!!!! 117 watts and rising.
November 12 at 8:12am
195 watts... The clouds are starting to break. 218 watts... 225 watts.... 251 watts. Now running at 1/20th of capacity. I can see the round shape of the sun in the clouds. 566 watts.... 620 watts.
November 12 at 8:19am
1768 watts.... 2087watts and rising fast. Sun has cleared the clouds. 2802 watts..... 2845 watts... Not bad for such a low sun angle... 2859 watts. Anyone need to borrow a cup of electricity?
November 12 at 8:27am
My power meter is going backwards.
November 12 at 8:45am
Just made it's first kilowatt-hr.
I'm 10cents richer. 3283 watts... 3307 watts....
November 12 at 8:47am
4121 watts. Awesome!!! But I see some ugly clouds rolling in.
Uh Oh 1821 watts.... 1773 watts... 1476 watts....
November 12 at 8:56am
With the sun behind ugly clouds, it's averaging about 800-1000 watts. My house power meter is still rolling backwards even with washer/drier running. Turning on the microwave oven causes it to roll forward briefly.
November 12 at 10:24am
clouds break. 5062 watts.
November 12 at 10:25am
Noticing that even though the meter is moving backwards, the numbers are not decrementing. I figured as much. I need to wait for the city to swap out the meter head with one that can. In the mean time, I am cleaning the oven using sun-power. Anyone want some free energy? For the next 4-hrs I'm just giving it back to the city for free.
November 12 at 5:37pm
Panels and inverter generated 20 kilowatt-hours of energy today. Not bad for a partly cloudy day in mid-November.
To celebrate the first day my solar array back-fed power to the electric grid, Cheryl made a solar array cake.
It was baked with 100% solar electricity. Mmmm taste that solar goodness..
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