Cali Kid Corals

PG&E really doesn't want anyone to keep reef tanks.

We researched solar. Quoted at around $17-$19k for I think enough panels to give us $200 worth of power (forgot wattage), however, our roof is 20+ years old and not very well done. So that adds $10k to the job, so we put it on hold.
 
Julius Chen said:
This thread finally pushed me over, and just signed a 9kwh contract today. Hope to go live by Jan end.

Thus I will be buying from craigslist for a longer time...
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If it makes you feel better, I just did my true up date in Nov and I owed nada, zilch, squat on my 7kWh system. It felt really good. ;)
 
I'd probably be free if I had 7kW which is just more than twice of what I have. Plus it doesn't help living on the coast where we're expected to use a smaller amount of power than those in the east/south bay. Of course having a large volume of water in my basement that gets really cold in the winter really doesn't help matters :D
 
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I live is Stockton we have 36 panels. our kw is 10,000 according to hubby. I learn an expensive lesson this year. In July we blew a breaker on our system and half of our panels were down. In the end our true up was 825.00. I noticed in July our usage off the grid jumped but did not know why (now I know). Found out about the breaker middle of November. Next year PG&E is buying my Christmas gifts for my family.
 
Yeah I can look at the inverter in the garage but at the time any monitoring hardware was very expensive for what it actually does, so looking around noon to see it is workjng is good. But if I had micro inverters where I couldnt see the output at a glance then I might consider it
 
Yup, seems similar to what existed when I got them installed. I know a guy who has them and it shows the output of every individual panel which is great information, but the hardware to make it do that was not cheap, also forget if there was a maintenance fee associated with using their cloud server. Either way in the grand scheme of things I should have not gone cheap considering I could have taken whatever federal rebate (30%) and applied it as well.
 
Does anybody have the tesla power wall with their solar? Would that protect you from the utility companies fees? But then the drawback is you can't sell excess electricity made.
 
The battery packs are becoming more affordable. IMO the greatest advantage of the battery pack is that if the neighborhood power goes out you can still have power. I do not have yet and so when there is a power outage PG&E somehow shuts off my power too.
 
Julius Chen said:
If u are refering to battery pack by tesla, i heard it is too expensive compared to saving pg&e fees.
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Yeah I shoulda just done some simply net research. Doesn't make sense at this point. The grid acts as the battery, and it's not like we have frequent power interruptions. Thanks. Are you happy with Ra solar?
 
It depends upon where you live, if you live in a rural area where if power goes down you could be out of power for weeks at a time... well then you fire up a generator no battery pack is going to be useful for you. If you lose power in an urban area it's usually a few hours, which can easily be mitigated with an aquarium without going to insane lengths with a Tesla power wall. And to be honest I can count the number of time I've lost power for more than a flicker over the past 20 years on one hand. This is why I'm ok with PG&E being my battery pack at a cost of something like $5/month.
 
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