New Project Coming Up -- Pole Mount | Page 8 | Alternative Energy | Forums

2.88 KW. All of our lights are LEDs and our biggest users of power are our water well pump and our fridge (plus the wife and kids ). Our place is 1200 sqft and if you put some of your electronics on surge protectors (to turn them "off off" when not being used) I think you will see that you don't use much power. Since you are on city water and city sewer I think you would also save a lot of power right there.

Not to beat a dead horse and FWIW even though you may have monthly costs I would check with your local power company to see what it would cost to sell back to the grid. Our local power (if we had it) would only charge a one time $100 fee to back feed the grid and credit us retail pricing on electric, which I think is $0.19 a KW. On sunny days we are usually up to 100% charge by 12PM or 1PM -- we could be selling back to the grid after that and getting monthly credits. In the winter we could use the grid power to charge up the batteries and I think we would come out ahead or break even for the year. 5KW would give you some nice "roll back" on your power meter and with the right solar equipment you can disconnect from the grid whenever you want and just run from your battery bank. Or run from the grid while charging your bank.

OK, so after waiting long enough I finally built a small "arm" to support the array while it has a more aggressive tilt. It is not adjustable currently although with some duplicate lengths of Unistrut I think I could make it somewhat adjustable.

The pictures don't show it but there were very high winds when I was working on the array and when I loosened up the bolts I had a fear that it would start tilting/spinning on its own accord. Thankfully nothing bad happened.

If you mean just the mount, poles, and cross bracing, probably ~$600. I would caution anyone doing this to put fewer panels on the mount. 12 panels that high in the air on a mount is a lot of action. That being said, this is the way I wanted to do it and I wouldn't change it. I have saved the roof of my barn and in the future may put some more panels on there -- non-tilting.

Thanks. Buying new probably would have been all of $3k but it probably be stronger and would have been a whole lot less hassle.