So this year I installed my own solar panel system here on my own roof and I learned a lot during the
process and so for today's CircuitBread Practical, I wanted to share with you
the top seven general things that I learned while installing my own solar panels on my roof. So
with that, I'm gonna start with number one. The first thing, as discussed in another video
is that solar installers either make a huge profit or they just cost a lot for
some reason. So when you're looking into it and trying to decide whether to do it for yourself
or going to have somebody else do it for you, crunch the numbers yourself, look at your own
capabilities, and for most people, installing your own solar is the way to go versus having somebody
else do it. But for more details go check out our other video because I beat that to death.
The second thing I learned as I was going through this process was to use a solar plan design
company. So I did not come up with the plans with these. I didn't come up with the plans that you
have to submit to your city, county, or state. In our case here in Idaho, we had to submit it to
the state of Idaho for the review. I did not come up with those plans. I paid somebody a couple of
hundred dollars to come up with those plans and they weren't perfect. I had to go and I had to
fix a couple of things and there were certain issues but they did the vast majority of the
groundwork that I wouldn't have understood the NEC requirements, all that sort of stuff.
So definitely it is worth the money to go to somebody else to get the design
for your system. However, garbage in - garbage out. You have to give them as much good
information as possible for them to design you the best system that works for your situation.
The third thing is you definitely need to get familiar with the NEC or the National
Electrical Code. Now every state or every locale has a different version that they follow so I
don't know if it'll be the 2017 or 20-whatever version that wherever you live has to follow but
you need to be familiar with, first of all, what version does apply to you and, second of all,
what is in there because when you get those plans, if you followed my advice for number
two and had somebody else do it, there's going to be a lot of references to that code.
And you should go and read that code yourself, all the references in the plans,
to have a better understanding because as you go through the process, if you don't know what's
happening, you're not going to be able to follow it and you might make deviations from the plan
unwittingly and cause problems or you might get asked questions by the plan reviewers and
you don't know what's going on. So it's really a good idea to familiarize yourself with at
least portions of the NEC that are applicable to solar installation. So that was probably
for me the most painful part of this entire process was understanding all that crazy legal
technical jargon that is, for me, a pain. The fourth thing is to check your equipment when
you order it. So you're going to be spending thousands of dollars on this equipment that
you're gonna be putting on your roof, as soon as it gets here, open that stuff up, review it,
take pictures. I ended up having to go through a couple of different companies to get things and
one of the companies they were very explicit when you order and they said when it shows up,
take a picture inside the truck before they pull it out. Once it comes out, get everything
unstrapped, take pictures as you're going along and do not sign for anything until you've examined
everything. And that would have been great advice if that had been the first company I went through
because the first company I went through didn't tell me at all what to do on the receiving end.
Two of the panels were broken and it turned into a big fiasco, a huge mess and I’m never
gonna work with them again because they were just terrible to work with and they basically said,
sorry you're out of luck, you don't get to do anything. So, definitely review your rights,
before you get them, know what the policy of the company is that you go through and
document everything because whether or not it's documentation to show the company or documentation
to show your credit card when you are submitting a fraud claim, you need that documentation.
I don't know what it is but as we've been building this house we've gotten a lot of freight
and freight just gets beat up. So look at everything. Two panels were broken, I had
bent leads on inverters, things like that. The inverters still were functional but those solar
panels were completely shattered and completely useless. So document everything, know your rights,
research it, and get in contact with the company as soon as possible if you have any
problems. Very important one, because there's a lot of money riding on the equipment.
The fifth thing I learned was in regards to the installation itself. Even besides what was in the
plans, I found out that grounding is everything. Ground the heck out of everything. Ground your
boxes together, everything's grounded together. You have grounding between the rails, between the
inverters, everything is grounded to death. Do not under-ground anything. So when I did this,
I thought that I was being extremely thorough with the grounding and I still, during the inspection,
was told, “Oh no, you have to do a little bit more grounding in this regard,” and holy cow, it's
everywhere. So do not be surprised if you have to ground things more than you thought even possible
and another thing, not so much a lesson learned but something you should be aware of during the
installation phase is - be careful. This is a really steep roof and we were up here for, I think
it took us about 10 hours total of installation up here on the roof, which considering how much
we were gonna get charged to make it, that's not very long. But still 10 hours up here, do not fall
off. One fall off the roof and suddenly you've paid more in emergency and ER bills and medical
bills than makes it worth it. So when you're doing the installation, please, please be careful
and ground the heck out of everything. So the sixth thing is what we found out
after we installed this is that bureaucracy is a real issue. So we're in Idaho and I did
a lot of talking with my brother-in-law down in California and we found out that
just everything's different. The way everything is run is different. Here in Idaho we got the
plans reviewed by the state and then the state sent out an inspector, an electrical inspector,
who reviewed everything looked and made sure that it matched the plans. And then we had to get Idaho
Power to actually come out and review it and make sure everything was good before they flipped it
on. Whereas my brother-in-law said that they had one person review it and then basically Edison,
their power company down there, said, “Okay, you can flip it on” and nobody even came out
and looked at it from the power company. So things are going to be different. However for us,
it took us three months from the time this was successfully installed before we could actually
turn it on because of the process. Because of going back and forth and the review of the plans
versus what the inspector saw, the inspectors was like, “This actually doesn't match with the
plans” and I disagreed but I’m not the inspector and so he made us go back to the state to get it
re-reapproved and then he had to come back and do and it took us three months. Now I think that's
abnormal and I don't think it should take that long but the bureaucracy is real and be prepared
for that because it can be frustrating. Which brings us to our last thing.
The seventh thing if you're going to be installing your own solar is to be patient. This is the thing
that I've had to learn because I started this nearly at the beginning of the year and right
now it's almost October. So it was around February to now, October, before we finally
got this turned on just about a week or two ago. It took patience sometimes to not get angry and,
fortunately, everybody I worked with, despite the bureaucracy, everybody here was incredibly
nice - very friendly but they had to work within the restrictions that they were given which was
frustrating. But fortunately they were at least polite and nice about it so didn't have to have
any issues there. At the same time, that patience is necessary and when you think about it doing it
by yourself you're like, “Man, if this took eight months just over the time of waiting for things,
and waiting for things to get shipped, and waiting for things to get approved and things like that,
going through to a solar installer they can do it much faster. I could be making money a
lot faster.” Well, yes, that's true. If I'd gotten this installed back in March or April or whatever,
it would have been producing money all this time instead of kind of sitting there. However,
the cost for a solar installer is so much greater than the cost of just waiting a couple of extra
months to get it figured out. So just keep that in perspective that even if it's slow and even
if it's frustrating, it's so much more costly, so much more economical to do it yourself and it's
really not that hard. Really, the vast majority of this was just waiting and getting things approved
and waiting and following up with things. I feel like total time actually put into this
was around three full working days, maybe four full working days, though if you count the amount
of time of me worrying and oh man what's going on there, it was longer than that but actually time
spent working on this was only a couple of days and saved about twenty thousand dollars, which is
huge. So just keep it all in perspective, be patient, it'll be worth it in the end.
And those are the seven things that I learned while installing my solar panels!
If you're watching this and you've installed solar panels, please leave a comment sharing your
experiences so that other people can learn from what we have done. If you enjoyed this
video give it a like, subscribe to our channel, we'll catch you in the next one.