Multiple Permits

[Hillsider]

Have any of you folks who did a grid-tied system, other than a total turnkey contract, carried out the installation as a "self contractor", by either pulling all permits required yourself, or entering into sub-contracts for specific parts of the install, where either you or the sub-contractor pulled the permits. The field-mounted 7.2KW I am contemplating can be broken down into at least three, and perhaps five distinct sub-operations. Under the rules of my county/state, I can do a self-install of the mechanical racking, solar panel & micro inverter components, plus the ( limited ) "placement" of combiner-boxes, service panels and PV system disconnect boxes. A licensed electrician is required for approving the intertie with the electrical grid ( SCE ). Trenching for the electrical conduit ( and the 4-wire #8 240V+ground cable ) does not require a permit, but if I choose to sub-contract the total conduit run, a permit would be required for that portion of the job, as well as another for the solar array itself. My local Building & Safety agency charges by the value of the improvement, not by the "complexity of the proposed system".
I am no longer interested in doing a turnkey project, as I don't expect to be in my present home for more than 7 years. I welcome any advice/information from forum members who have either completed a project this way, or investigated the details sufficiently to conclude that the approach was not economic.

[sdold]

I installed my own system, but I only pulled one permit for the whole system. It was a basic system on a roof with no trenching. There was no requirement for a licensed electrician to do anything. As far as the cost of the permit, If you are in California, I think it's limited to $500 or less and needs to be based on the cost of the permit process rather than the value of the system or the complexity. Take a look at these to see what I mean

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/GOV/1/7/d1/4/2/s65850.55

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_1801-1850/ab_1801_bill_20120925_chaptered.pdf

When I turned in my plans they weren't aware of this, and estimated that my permit fee would be around $600-$800. I emailed them a link to the above code and it ended up just over $300.

[Hillsider]

I installed my own system, but I only pulled one permit for the whole system. It was a basic system on a roof with no trenching. There was no requirement for a licensed electrician to do anything. As far as the cost of the permit, If you are in California, I think it's limited to $500 or less and needs to be based on the cost of the permit process rather than the value of the system or the complexity. Take a look at these to see what I mean

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/GOV/1/7/d1/4/2/s65850.55

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_1801-1850/ab_1801_bill_20120925_chaptered.pdf

When I turned in my plans they weren't aware of this, and estimated that my permit fee would be around $600-$800. I emailed them a link to the above code and it ended up just over $300.

Thanks for the input Steve. My previous sources for permit requirements & fees were a report by the Sierra Club on southern California permitting fees & the California Solar Permitting Handbook. Both were rather vague about the state requirement for basing fees on the effort to process the paperwork and perform necessary inspections. The Sierra Club doc listed L.A. County fees at $1,144, so I "assumed" that figure was based on a complex/costly system; hence my interest in breaking the project into smaller chunks. I am an Electrical Engineer, so I am not afraid of the hands-on part of installing a new 200A Load Center + PV-Disconnect ( rewired my garage and pool pump-house, with a sub-panel for the variable-speed pump & pool cleaner last December ). The item I am most interested in subbing out, is the conduit run ( approximately 120' ) from the array sub-panel to the PV disconnect at the back of the house. Dealing with the PVC pipe and THHN wire is a no-brainer. The scary part ( for an old goat like me ) is running an RT12 Ditch Witch down a 27 degree rocky slope, to produce the required 18"x30" trench. The local landscaping contractors around here have all the business they can handle ( mostly drip irrigation projects ) due to the drouth, and are not interested in subbing a trenching job.

[sdold]

I think I would sub out the trenching and conduit too, because that doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. Did you decide if you wanted to go with the Enphase envoy monitoring? This sounds like an interesting installation, it would be fun to see pics when you get going.

[inetdog]

You might be able to do pretty well on the trenching "subbing it out" to a couple of guys who stand around outside the Home Depot store, using shovels. Not as fancy as a trenching machine, but often cost effective.

[foo1bar]

I installed my own system, but I only pulled one permit for the whole system. It was a basic system on a roof with no trenching. There was no requirement for a licensed electrician to do anything. As far as the cost of the permit, If you are in California, I think it's limited to $500 or less and needs to be based on the cost of the permit process rather than the value of the system or the complexity. Take a look at these to see what I mean

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/GOV/1/7/d1/4/2/s65850.55

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_1801-1850/ab_1801_bill_20120925_chaptered.pdf

When I turned in my plans they weren't aware of this, and estimated that my permit fee would be around $600-$800. I emailed them a link to the above code and it ended up just over $300.

I just pulled the permit for my system last week.
Cost was $293.70 for permit for a roof mount system. It was $50 for electrical, and I think ~$115 for "plan check" and ~$125 for the "building permit" and <$10 in various misc. fees.
I can either do all of the work myself or subcontract part or all of it out.
One of the pieces of paper that I signed says that if I hire someone whoever I hire will be someone I pay as an employee (and I'll be responsible for workers comp, etc. etc.) Or they need to be a licensed contractor.
FWIW in my town the minimum $ for an electrical permit is $50.
So if you wanted to split it into multiple permits, you'd have to pay that $50 each time there was an electrical portion.

I didn't know about this law though - and I believe that my permit fees were based on valuation. But for $300 I doubt they're actually going to be making any money off the permit/inspection department. $300 I think will barely cover the electrical inspector coming out for the rough and the final, much less the time for the office staff and overhead.

[Hillsider]

I think I would sub out the trenching and conduit to, because that doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. Did you decide if you wanted to go with the Enphase envoy monitoring? This sounds like an interesting installation, it would be fun to see pics when you get going.

I oversimplified when I referred to subbing out the trenching job. I also presumed I would include the digging of 10 -12 16"x36" holes for the Ironridge piers ( required for a pre-engineered rack made of 2" schedule-40 galvanized pipe ). That job, in the detailed overall project description, could also have been done by "day laborers", using a rented 2-man gas-powered auger. My first design utilized the Power-1 Micro 0.3-I micro inverters ( and Aurora gateway ), as they are a better match to 300W panels, than the Enphase M250 inverters ( no summer power clipping ). The downside of the P-1 option, was the wifi monitoring scheme, which would require a wifi repeater part way up the hill due to the distance from my modem/router. The Enphase system, using poweline communication to my router ( particularly, with the new wifi enabled Envoy unit ) is a much cleaner approach, but summer clipping would be a problem with 300W panels, particularly the LG300N1C-B3 panel. The "announcement" of the new all-in-one LG300A1c-B3 got my attention, as the associated inverter ( LM305UE-G1 ) would match the power capability of the panel. The preliminary spec on the inverter seemed to imply wifi communication, but little info could be found from an online search.

[sdold]

How did you figure out that you'd get clipping, is there a way to predict that? I have 250W panels, and Enphase M215 microinverters, and the most I've seen from the inverters was around 220 watts on a couple of days in July. The plots of the wattage produced on those days don't have flat tops, so I assumed that meant they weren't saturated. My array is oriented 225 degrees true at 23 degrees tilt from horizontal, not sure if that's a factor.

Does the P-1 also have a wired ethernet jack? It might be possible to use a pair of those ethernet-over-powerline devices. I have a pair streaming internet content to my TV, I'm surprised at how well they work, as long as there aren't two sets of them on a system at the same time.

The enphase powerline data might make it 140 feet. I use the Envoy and get "full signal bars" from the inverters about 70 feet away from the inverters. I had to use toroids to isolate the panels and envoy from the rest of the house, luckily I had installed the system on its own sub panel, making it easy. Without the toroids I had no bars and no communication.

[Hillsider]

Update on the LG All-in-one panel

After doing my last post on this thread, I did a search, to see if more information was available on the LG300A1C-B3 AC panel. A major distributor in New Mexico; Focused Energy ( focusedenergy.net ) had a 6-page pdf from LG that detailed the panel communication scheme. It was titled MonoXACe-CTL-final-1[1].pdf, and presented a fairly complete picture of the product in a total system setting. No product names/numbers were given for the gateway or array interconnect cabling, however. I also found a press release issued jointly by Focused Energy & LG, announcing the rollout of the product in Sacramento, early this month. Since it seems that LG, like Enphase, will be using power-line communication, I will proceed to do a new design based on this module. At their "stated" AC output of 305VAC/panel, I will do a cost trade-off analysis for both a 22 & 24 panel system. In the event a 24-panel system produces >100% annual Kwh output, I may just set up the racking for 24 panels anyway, in case SCE & I get divorced in the future.

[Hillsider]

Micro Inverter Clipping &amp; Household Electrical Interference

How did you figure out that you'd get clipping, is there a way to predict that? I have 250W panels, and Enphase M215 microinverters, and the most I've seen from the inverters was around 220 watts on a couple of days in July. The plots of the wattage produced on those days don't have flat tops, so I assumed that meant they weren't saturated. My array is oriented 225 degrees true at 23 degrees tilt from horizontal, not sure if that's a factor.

Does the P-1 also have a wired ethernet jack? It might be possible to use a pair of those ethernet-over-powerline devices. I have a pair streaming internet content to my TV, I'm surprised at how well they work, as long as there aren't two sets of them on a system at the same time.

The enphase powerline data might make it 140 feet. I use the Envoy and get "full signal bars" from the inverters about 70 feet away from the inverters. I had to use toroids to isolate the panels and envoy from the rest of the house, luckily I had installed the system on its own sub panel, making it easy. Without the toroids I had no bars and no communication.

I have to confess that I took a shortcut to calculate several possible panel & micro inverter combos. Rather than using PVWatts and going through all the numbers "longhand", I used the California Solar Initiative Calculator ( based on PVWatts-2 ), & plugged in the panel & inverter types, along with array tilt, azimuth & shading factors. Whenever the calculated CEC-AC value exceeded that of the inverter, the CSI calculator "truncated" the value to that of the inverter, and produced AC KW & KWh values consistent with that value. Did you search out the observations of other system owners, who have Enphase micros & the Envoy gateway ( regarding household electrical interference )? The 6-page blurb LG issued this summer on their new LG300A1C-B3 AC panels, made a pretty strong statement, regarding the noise-rejection capability of their gateway.

[sdold]

I did, Enphase has a forum where the interference problems were discussed. Luckily part of my job includes interference-hunting, so I have a big supply of toroids. Sounds like LG has addressed the problem. I never did find the source of the interference.