"Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun." -Anonymous

Did you know that the area of California I live in gets roughly 300 days of sun per year? I didn't either. But now I do, and we had photovoltaic panels installed on our roof to take advantage of that.

Launch a window that lets you monitor the systems statistics. It is a small script that reports relevant data on the inverter and panels, reloading during active times once per 15 seconds. The script sleeps and checks in once every 10 minutes when the sun is down. New, woo - it's color coded.

See our current generation as a large window or a small thumbnail. These graphs are updated every 10 minutes and show our watts per second generated versus the time of the day. You can't see the labels on the small graph, but it's a compact way to monitor the progress throughout the day. If you click on the small graph you will call up the large graph, and vice versa.

Archives of previous generation days' graphs show what the spread of power looks like over time throughout the current year. These graphs don't have more than basic labels.

A record log of general daily performance shows peak power output to the grid, how much power we made that day, time online and total power output during the life of the system.

You can also see insolation graphs for the entire years of 2006 or 2007.

Speaking of projects I need to finish, I have pictures of the install in progress. This is just a collection of the pictures with no accompanying text, but it gives you a general idea of the work & stuff involved.

Roger DeNault's here in Santa Cruz, Ca, was who I contacted to get the ball rolling.

Brian Anderson's did the installation of the panels, inverter & related hardware. Brian has done a number of impressive solar & electrical projects.

Note that these pages look fine under Mozilla, Firebird, and pretty much any browser... except Internet Explorer. IE, Bill Gates: you suck.

This has also been a "bumper crop" year for our solar; we produced 128 kWhours more our second year than the first. It's been a dry and sunny year and that's really only 2.7% more than the previous, but in a world where you expect things to work worse as time goes on - and is expected in this case - it's odd. I have seen numbers along the lines of .67% power production drop per year for typical solar photovoltaic installations, which if that's the case means we really made about 3.4% more power.

The numbers are in. We have $97.77 in credits - that is, money PG&E owes us but doesn't pay. That is far better than last year's rediculous overproduction, I'll admit. The electric car was out of commission a while due to a lame SUV driver (are there any other kind?) running a stop sign and how long it took to get replacement parts. By my calculation I have at least enough power, if I charge it myself with the panels, to get 2800 more free miles from that power. The car was out for 7 months (!), while that power surplus translates to about 410 miles per month or about 100 miles per week - about what I use. Of course, I also charge at work, but perhaps next year I'll get closer still to using all the power I make...

I will admit, knowing that I can drive more than 100 miles per week for free, with no linked costs of regular service, oil, filter or plug changes, none of the usual ICE car problems, is pretty nice. I will need to rotate my tires sometime this year, and I might need to top off my windshield wiper solution. I suppose I might want (not need) to replace the batteries by 2020. $2000 at most every decade? Regular service alone on a normal car, not even talking about gas or oil, is greater than that after about 3-5 years.

Sadly, those credits go away at the end of the year... it's still the equivalent of more than 6 MEGAwatthours for the year. We can use about 515 kWh per month and have no electric utility charge whatsoever.

Getting all analytical on the actual power we produced, that's:

• the energy in 4.155 TONS of TNT (boom...)
• the energy required to make 176,341 cups of coffee (zOoM!)
• just shy of 4 tomahawk missiles (no, George, you can't have them)
• 3 tons of offset carbon dioxide burned via coal

Neat, huh? Oh, and to the way-too-regular question of "Doesn't it take more energy to make the system then you'll ever get out of it?" - see this US Government Department of Energy page that talks specifics. Our system uses ribbon multicrystalline silicon in the Kyocera kc167g panels. Counting all pieces of the system, right down to the Xantrex GridTie 3.0 inverter, metal mounting bits & wiring, and it takes 2 years to pay off the energy expended. We reach that amount as of November 10, 2007. That return is commensurate with - or better than - a normal modern power plant startup costs, and my maintance costs are zero.