About another week later, a SRP representative, and the residential project manager from our solar integrators came by to add in the new SRP solar power meters and activate our new solar system in Catalina Bay III. The process took about a half hour, after which the system completed it's extensive diagnostics. Later in the afternoon, with 8 PCs, a refrigerator, and at least one heat pump running, I checked the SRP total power use meter. Following the explanation by the SRP rep, it looked like during the height of the day, we were actually running all of the above systems at no cost to us, and also feeding about a kw of power back into the SRP grid. At this rate, we should see a major reduction in our next monthly power bill.
The final step happen a few days later, when an solar team technician returned to install the zigbee based power monitoring system. This allows me to watch our solar system from our PCs or smartphone, along with being tied into the system manufacturer's data center though the internet, for additional alerts, software updates, etc.
With our Sun Valley Solar system operational for it's half year, our previous $400+ SRP bills for a 3300 sq. ft. home dropped to an average of about $155 per month. Aside from the increased value of our home ( 2-3%+ ), we are expecting about a 70% savings to our SRP bills, with a payback of under 5 years.
We hosted a well attended seminar this summer in The Islands HOA clubhouse, with an SRP representative and our solar installer, presenting the actual numbers and saving behind our installation.
If anyone is interested in the details of this, please email me at rayjanus@earthlink.net so I can share much more information with you.