My New 7.56KW Ground Mount.. First Light, First Watts..

What a mess! Concrete everywhere.. Ruined my $25 Walmart shoes, my pants were covered in concrete, I even had concrete in my hair!

And then the nightmare continues with more digging for the electrical lines.. We had to run 150 feet back to the house panel so I used 4ga wire. I could have gotten away with something much smaller like 10ga or 8 ga, but smaller wire would have resulted in power losses.. The 4ga wire only suffers 0.8% at full power. We also laid in an auxiliary 1 inch conduit for other power wires and a 1/2 inch conduit for Ethernet communications to the array.

Finally able to remove the sonotubes and most of the support wood..

Do some grading and plant some grass seed and start installing rails and power systems.

Starting to look like a solar system...

A view of the inverter and back side of the panels...

Finally! All of the panels are up.. Anyone ever notice when you build something there's always extra parts left over? LOL
The extra panels are actually just back ups.. spares that will be stored in a Faraday cage for safe keeping.

I currently have just the first two columns closest to the camera hooked up.. I still have 20 more panels to wire but the first 8 are already producing power and feeding it back to the grid. Even on a cloudy day, I'm seeing between 400 and 1000 watts coming from them.. Very cool!

We got first light today on our new solar system install... only two columns (8 panels) are connected and its totally cloudy but we're producing almost 800 watts of power. When the clouds clear, the power jumps up to 1900 watts..
I still have five more columns (20 more panels) too hook up yet but we are producing.

Designed and built the system myself.. Using SMA SunnyBoy inverter and SolarWorld panels for a total DC rating of 7.56 KW and I have another 2000 watts of extra panels I haven't even hooked up yet.

Started laying out the positions of the support structure columns...

Placing concrete forms 6 feet below grade. Concrete forms are 22 inches diameter below grade and 20 inches above grade. I used steel 55 gallon drums with the tops and bottoms cut out and attached sonotubes to the top of them for the above ground sections.

Because our solar array is 40 feet long and located on an east-west slope, there is a 36 inch difference between the west side and east side so our concrete pillars had to extend above ground at varying heights to adjust for the changing grade.

Some of the Sonotubes are really tall!

After three weeks of almost no rain at all, which is really nice when you're digging holes, we got rain.. right at the time when I wanted rain the least.. All of our forms flooded and eventually were completely submerged and filled with water.. and then more rain.. and more rain..

I had to go to Harbor Freight and purchase one of their trash pumps.. Each concrete form held over 100 gallons of water..

When the weather finally gave us a break, it was back to work setting up wood supports to hold all the pipe that will make the solar framework.

More wood, more supports... The 3 inch sch40 pipe we used is very heavy.. All total, there's about 2800 lbs of framework. Just lifting a 10 foot piece is difficult to do manually... Heavy stuff...
Except the shortest pieces, all the vertical pipes had to be hoisted into position with machinery.

I have to say.. I'm tired of screwing wood together and working with steel pipe for a while...

I used 5000 psi concrete.. very strong stuff normally used for industrial applications.. Even so, I wasn't happy with the tallest sonotubes relying on their own structural integrity so I decided to embed rebar into the four tallest at the far side.. While it may look like the rebar is close to the concrete form, it is at least 3 inches away on all sides.

Finally time to pour concrete! Yippee!! 8 Cubic yards to fill up all the forms. And I was considering buying a concrete mixer and doing it myself.. Yikes! Glad I didn't go that route or I'd still be mixing concrete today.
The concrete driver was amazing! I was not able to allow him access to the low side of the array and we were really worried that he wouldn't be able to snake the concrete chute between all that wood support and piping.. but he did.. and he never touched or bumped a single part of the structure. Amazing skill..

To be continued.....