We have a fun tradition at A&R Solar of allowing our employees to decide what organizations the company should donate to at the end of the year. During the past two years, we've extended that to our solar customers, allowing them to nominate nonprofits in their communities. We received amazing recommendations! We were happy to see groups that care for the...
New affordable housing Eleanor Apartments in Bellingham, Washington, goes solar to help protect the environment and assist with city’s housing crisis. Mercy Housing Northwest developed and operates the Eleanor Apartments, a new affordable senior housing community located in Bellingham. The nonprofit decided to add solar power to its affordable housing community when it was being designed. This was done as part...
Mighty Tieton adds solar to its largest facility to do away with a substantial electric bill and continue to support artists and the town of Tieton. The partners at Mighty Tieton chose to add a solar system to their 40,000-square-foot facility to eliminate the bulk of their almost $2,000 a month power bill. They felt that bringing the bill down to...
Transcript One of the most common questions is what performance can I expect from my system? To understand that, you have to understand how a system is sized, or what the nameplate rating means. If you take one module that is 300 watts and multiply that by 30, then you get a 9 kW system. In reality that 9 kW system, those modules...
Transcript The solar panels on your roof collect the energy from the sun and convert that into DC voltage. That DC voltage then travels down into your inverter which converts into AC voltage. That AC voltage is going to be used by the loads in your home like a refrigerator in the daytime or the air conditioner, something being used in your...
Transcript Here's a little science lesson for you. A kilowatt is a unit of measurement, and it's a thousand watts. A watt is the electrical Standard for energy transferred and is calculated from volts X amps. You'll typically see watts, like a 60-watt lightbulb. If I had a 60-watt lightbulb on for one hour, it would consume 60 watt hours. If...
Transcript There are a lot of different inverter manufacturers out there, and they all provide--or the majority provide--some sort of monitoring. Monitoring is the ability for you to see the performance of your system remotely. That's either going to be on a website or on an app on your phone. Typically you're going to be able to see the total production of...
Transcript Some of the main issues we run into when you have a monitoring site--it's really just internet related. You may go log in and see that you don't have a few days of data or sometimes even a month's worth of data. If that happens, it's typically that your system is just not connected to the internet. We have to use a...
Transcript There is a fair amount of systems which will have built-in monitoring. That monitoring is provided by the manufacturer and it's run by the manufacturer. This monitoring is going to be something that you, as the end user, can log into and see your production of your system and track trends in the production. You can see the different months of...
Transcript With your photovoltaic system, there aren't a whole lot of moving parts, and there's not a lot of things to fail. Typically the PV modules are going to be the most robust part of your system. There are modules out there that have been performing since the '70s, so we don't see a whole lot of failures there. The inverter would be...