Monitoring Our Solar Power
September 10, 2009
In my last blog entry, I wrote about our new solar electric system here on our office at Royal Covers. I mentioned that we can track our solar production online, and I just realized that I can give anyone access to the website. Thus you yourself can see how efficient and productive our solar system is from your own home! You can even calculate our daily savings yourself.
We are very proud of our production to this point, and are in fact on track to produce even more electricity than we projected. Obviously our system is still very early along in it’s lifecycle, but it’s fun to see the numbers as we produce solar electricity!
Simply fill out the form here and ask me for access to our solar tracking (in the “additional comments” section) if you would like to see it for yourself. I will respond as quickly as I can.
We’ve got Solar Power!
September 8, 2009
Here at Royal Covers we recently installed a 20Kw solar energy system with Sharp solar panels on our office building in Mesa, AZ (a suburb of Phoenix)! We are excited to have the solar power system commissioned by SRP so it is up and running and producing most of our electricity. One of the unique things about our office’s system is we used a new technology called micro-inverters to convert the solar power to useable electricity more efficiently. It is one of the first commercial applications of this technology in SRP territory.
On top of increasing efficiency, the micro-inverters also allow us to monitor the electricity produced by each individual solar panel throughout the day. This is all tracked online by Enphase Energy, the micro-inverter’s manufacturer, and is a lot of fun to watch! In fact, we are having trouble looking away from the website as we are excited to see how much electricity we are producing.
We plan to save $250 per month on electricity and realize an after tax return of 11.2% over the life of the system with a simple payback of about 9 years after rebates.
These micro-inverters can be installed on both residential solar systems and commercial solar systems, and we have already installed them on 3 residential solar systems in addition to our office. Contact us today if you would like to find out more about this exciting technology!
Below is a picture of the roof of our office with solar electricity producing panels.
-Tanner
