Wednesday, 23 July 2014

With electricity prices in Australia seeming to be only going up, and solar being surprisingly cheap, I decided it was a no-brainer to invest in a solar installation to reduce my ongoing electricity bills. It also paves the way for getting an electric car in the future. I'm also a greenie, so having some renewable energy happening gives me the warm and fuzzies.

So today I got solar installed. I've gone for a 2 kWh system, consisting of 8 250 watt Seraphim panels (I'm not entirely sure which model) and an Aurora UNO-2.0-I-OUTD inverter.

It was totally a case of decision fatigue when it came to shopping around. Everyone claims the particular panels they want to sell at the best. It's pretty much impossible to make a decent assessment of their claims. In the end, I went with the Seraphim panels because they scored well on the PHOTON tests. That said, I've had other solar companies tell me the PHOTON tests aren't indicative of Australian conditions. It's hard to know who to believe. In the end, I chose Seraphim because of the PHOTON test results, and they're also apparently one of the few panels that pass the Thresher test, which tests for durability.

The harder choice was the inverter. I'm told that yield varies wildly by inverter, and narrowed it down to Aurora or SunnyBoy. Jason's got a SunnyBoy, and the appeal with it was that it supported Bluetooth for data gathering, although I don't much care for the aesthetics of it. Then I learned that there was a WiFi card coming out soon for the Aurora inverter, and that struck me as better than Bluetooth, so I went with the Aurora inverter. I discovered at the eleventh hour that the model of Aurora inverter that was going to be supplied wasn't supported by the WiFi card, but was able to switch models to the one that was. I'm glad I did, because the newer model looks really nice on the wall.

The whole system was up at running just in time to catch the setting sun, so I'm looking forward to seeing it in action tomorrow.

Apparently the next step is Energex has to come out to replace my analog power meter with a digital one.

I'm grateful that I was able to get Body Corporate approval to use some of the roof. Being on the top floor helped make the installation more feasible too, I think.

Today was ridiculously busy.

I woke up pretty early, but ended up not getting out of bed until about 7:30am. While I was in the shower, the guy from Origin buzzed to get let in because he wanted to replace the building's hot water meters. Then I raced next door for my chiropractic adjustment.

I got back home, had breakfast, and started cleaning the house, which I mostly finished by 11am, then I biked over for my massage. While I was getting my massage, the solar installer tried calling me because they'd arrived. Fortunately they didn't have to wait too long.

I did a bit more cleaning for 45 minutes, raced out to Grill'D to grab some lunch and then over to Kindergarten to chair the PAG meeting.

After the meeting, I picked up Zoe and Megan, and we went home to see how the solar installers were going.

They were making a spectacular mess, and we didn't have a lot of time before we had to head out again for Zoe's swim class. We drove over to the pool, and discovered a few other kids from Zoe's Kindergarten were in the preceding classes. Zoe's swim school is running a 2 for 1 thing this term because of the cold weather, to try and keep kids enrolled. I figured twice as many swim classes could only help, so jumped at the chance.

Megan was happy to play around while we waited for Zoe to have her class, and then we went home again. The solar installers were just finishing up.

No sooner had they walked out the door and the woman I'd organised to do indoor air quality testing arrived. I'm wanting to rule out living on a busy road having any contribution to Zoe's suspected asthma.

I was making a new Thermomix recipe for dinner, and Laura was coming over for dinner after she picked up Megan's little sister from day care. Dinner turned out really well, but with all of the preceding madness, I didn't get it started until a bit later than I had hoped, and so it was on the table later than I'd have liked.

Once Laura left with her kids, I chucked Zoe in the shower and got her down to bed only about 20 minutes later than normal. She slept through the night last night for Sarah, so I'm hoping she'll sleep through the night again tonight.