Date: November 6 - December 15, 2025
The building design incorporated solar panels from the very beginning two years ago. The orientation of the building was twisted toward the south albeit into the hill, and the size, pitch and dimensions of the roof were chosen to optimize solar gain. I ran my initial design by two solar installation companies (Sugar Hollow and Sundance, who did our solar hot water system) for review. Scott, the sales guy from Sugar Hollow Solar, came out to look at the site in January 2024. He described the install process and asked that I contact him for a bid when a rough install date was known.
Once we got the footers poured in May 2025 I got back in touch with both vendors and asked for bids. for both panels and battery backup. In the interim Trump got put back in office and got rid of the solar and energy efficiency tax credits, effective end of 2025. So we definitely needed to get moving on this aspect of the project. The bids took about a month to come in. Sugar Hollow was 10% cheaper at $50,000 and more responsive but wanted to install the Tesla inverter and battery. Hiss. Sundance was more thorough in the site analysis and used hardware from a not-musk vendor, but our past history with the solar hot water on the house hadn't all been positive. So I decided to go with Sugar Hollow which meant putting down a 20% deposit. I learned during the bidding process that the solar controller would only see one "leg" of our power supply. (In an early post I described having separate 200 amp legs for house and shop behind a 400 amp service/meter). Bummer, although I'm not sure it would have made any difference to the design if I had known that earlier!
One thing was sure, and that was that I didn't want to set up that battery backup on the shop leg - I wanted it on the house leg. And that meant that we could and should target integrating the solar system on the existing fully functional house breaker box. Which meant that completion of the shop would not be necessary in order to go live with solar electric. A completed roof was the only dependency on the shop project.
Shortly before the roof was done I contacted Ryan the Sugar Hollow project manager. He had said he would drop off roof safety anchors for the roofer to install, but hadn't made it out. When the roofing was imminent Ryan got around to visiting and assessed the situation. I was particularly concerned that they would be able to use the existing conduit which ran between the old barn and the house since it's route was perfect. I also wanted to make sure I'd be able to get 33 panels into the space on the roof. We did some back-and-forth on the exact layout.
Anyhow it seems that even though I'd put down the 20% deposit, I wasn't actually in their schedule, and they didn't put me in the schedule until the roof was finished. So another month went by before Stan, the advance man responsible for a detailed site survey, came out in early October with a drone and a camera to document the whole scene. Again I explained about using the existing conduit.
Once Stan's report was done then my job got in the queue for the actual install. On October 20 Ryan let me know that the layout had to change "based on the measurements gathered from the drone flight." They proposed this asymmetric mess:
I sent it back and asked for something more balanced which resulted in this which I was happier with.
I also had to sign off on the placement of the equipment which showed how that existing conduit would be used. I was getting a bit nervous about whether this system would be functional by the end of the year, but Ryan said he didn't foresee that would be a problem.
The office folks at Sugar Hollow asked me to visit French Broad Electric to apply for the interconnect. They have a list of requirements including notarized signatures, but at least they have a notary on staff to do that. Besides absolving them of any liability, they require proof of homeowner's insurance.
Shortly thereafter I got a call from Ryan saying that, after their licensed electrician had looked at the site photos, they would NOT be using the existing conduit as we'd been planning. The problem was that on the house side you could see that the conduit was actually 1" white PVC pipe, and electrical is required to be routed through grey PVC. Ryan said they would bury new code-compliant grey conduit in a new ditch, but it would be a change order that would increase the price. That was a pisser after all those site visits and discussions. I called back a short while later and said what if magically all the visible pipe was grey - would they use it then? He said "no, we still know that the buried part is white." To which I responded "no you don't, unless you dig it up!" He then said the add-on price would be in the $1000 to $1200 range, which didn't seem like all that much to me so I said OK, have it your way. Also I can always use that conduit for an ethernet cable.
So the crew came out on November 6. We got a lucky break on the weather - although chilly in the morning it was warm and clear which is what you need for roof work.
They shared a trick for working on metal roofs which is shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and spraying the roof surface with it. After drying the roof is tacky for improved traction. And it self cleans whenever it next rains.
The first step is to clamp the support rack onto the standing seams of the roof:
Next day they started hoofing the panels up there
Days like that and you start to feel like you're making progress! But in hindsight I've got to agree with George Jameson (bike friend who put in solar electric) that the panels are the easiest and cheapest part of the job.
We went up to Blacksburg to visit the progeny that weekend. The return trip was a nail-biter with electric car battery draining fast as we drove straight into a big storm blowing in Sunday night. Arrived home with 2% left in the car battery! Sugar Hollow said the weather would delay them getting back to the job, but it gave me a chance to watch the snow melt and see if my much ballyhooed snow guard would do it's job:
So the gutters survived this first test, but you'll agree it's not exactly convincing that they'll handle a heavier load.
With the weather interruption, the momentum died and I didn't hear from them for a week. The following week the first sign of action on Monday was a rental company delivering a Ditch Witch which Sugar Hollow had rented for the trenching. It sat out there until Wednesday the 19th when a different crew headed up by Robbie got there to install the battery unit and complete the wiring.
I had marked the location of all the conflicting pipes that were routed up the same part of the driveway that they were going to trench and French Broad came and marked the fiber optic wire that runs through there to. I've tried to keep photographs of all the ditches and pipes I've laid around here, organized in a "whats in the ground" folder on my computer. I was able to find the water line from September 18, 2008:
One of the problems with this approach is that the visual context evolves so some translation is necessary to figure out where that pipe is in the current driveway, which is now about 3 feet wider. The other problem was I couldn't find pictures for the buried electrical and conduit in my folder. I clearly remember the pictures - I did take them - but somehow they have got lost. I even fired up all my old computers to see if they might have failed to be copied forward, but no luck.
So I spray painted marks on the ground with my best guess. Later it occurred to me that when the French Broad Electric guys asked me "if there was anything else?" that they would probably have been able to use their sensor to locate MY wires too, and wouldn't have minded doing it. I'll try to remember that lesson.
Robbie the solar installer wasn't too worried about it since he said they could dowse the location, especially the water. He bent a couple of copper wires and showed me how they would cross when walking over the pipe location. I tried it. It sure seems like it works and it confirmed what I had determined from the photos.
Some of the guys put up the battery on the garage wall, while the others started digging. Here's the Tesla battery (in a recent photo since I didn't capture it at the time):
They also decided that as long as they were running the conduit they would drill a new hole through the ICF wall instead of using the via that I had installed when the wall was built. It probably was just as easy to drill a hole as it would have been to dig down through the backfill that I had needed to put in where the via was located. They left a little slack in the flexy conduit so we could pull the exterior shut off switch away to install the siding.
The Ditch-Witch struggled with all the railroad ballast I'd used for the driveway base, but it did a better job than I was expecting:
They hand-dug the trench where it crossed the water line, but it was deep enough to not be exposed.
I got a lot of photos for future reference, including some distances from artifacts that will hopefully be there for a long time:
We had to pause work the next day so the county could perform an inspection on the ditch. Which took about 3 minutes. So the day after that they filled it and placed some fancy warning tape above it which has metal in it so it can be detected by those ground sensors.
I volunteered to use my tractor for the remaining fill.
That red machine in the background is the Ditch Witch.
Robbie said they'd need to cut power to tie the system into the house panel, and it would probably take less than an hour. I had to run some errands that afternoon so I informed Charla and the guys working on the siding about the expected power outage and ran off in the car. When I got back around six Charla was quite irritated because the power was out for three hours which also cut out the internet and stopped the siding work. I seem to have a knack for not being around when the shit hits the fan!
In this photo, the panel on the right is the existing house wiring, the center white Tesla box is the integration controller fed by the grey box which is another shut-off switch which supports the firefighter's emergency stop button.
That Ditch Witch didn't get picked up Friday, so I decided to stretch my ethics a bit and "borrow" it over the weekend to dig the trenches I need for the sewer and power to the shop. I never used one before. After trying to work from the bottom of the hill upward I figured out I had to go down the hill because there just wasn't enough traction in the wet soil to propel it. It was a lot of wrestling to keep it going roughly where I wanted. It was almost dark when I finished and in the icy evening air I hosed it off thoroughly so it wouldn't cause problems with the rental company return folks.
OK! Panels up, battery installed, wiring integrated. When do I start getting electricity? An email announced that my project manager Ryan was leaving Sugar Hollow. After Thanksgiving I sent an email --- crickets. Next day I called Ryan although I thought he'd left, but he still had a couple days in the office. He explained that the remaining steps were to get the inspection, then someone from Sugar Hollow would enable the system and walk me though its operation, but export to the power grid would be disabled until French Broad Electric came and certified the system. French Broad would run a test that if grid power was cut, my solar system would not light up the wires when they might be working on them. That's one of the functions of the controller shown above. If the test passed, they would replace my meter with one that could measure how much power we sent to the grid. He also said that Matt would be my new project manager.
The inspector made it out the next day and was satisfied with a perfunctory once-over. This time I made sure I got the green card approval:
Once that system was up there and I got the invoice for payment, that question of insurance started to nag at me. Yeah, I should probably make sure my new building is added to my policy. I gave my guy at Farm Bureau a call and sent him some photos. He said without the siding done it looked like a work in progress and they'd probably reject it. I asked what one is expected to do in this situation and he said you get a construction policy. Oh well, I missed that memo. He sent it in, and some days later let me know it didn't pass muster. I put a reminder in to send him photos after the siding was done so he could try again. Which all happened eventually. And FYI the folks at FB HQ okayed me for coverage in late December.
Seems at this point I went back into some schedule queue to listen to the crickets. I called Matt and he said that the order was first the power company inspects to provide a "Permission to Operate" THEN Sugar Hollow would enable the system. I tried to tell him that Ryan had explained that French Broad does it the other way round (Duke Energy covers most of Sugar Hollow's territory and used Matt's order). He didn't want to hear it.
I googled the Tesla instructions for enabling the Powerwall 3 system and it was no surprise that it required access to the internet, either through the cell phone network or WiFi. Which is a problem. There's no cell coverage here, and I doubted my outside router would get through the garage wall. I ordered a second high-power router online and within a week I had it transmitting WiFi from under the eave of the house closest to the garage.
Anyhow it was another week before Matt called to say he was wrong and they'd be out on Wednesday December 10th to enable the system, and the guy from French Broad would come with them.
Enabling the system was just flipping the switches and connecting the phone app to configure it. My WiFi solution seemed to work. Of course the Powerwall battery didn't have a full charge, and because they were late showing up, the beautiful sunny morning had turned into a dreary cloudy afternoon. Unlucky timing because the French Broad guy said he needed a full charge to do his test. Instructing us to give him a call if the battery got charged the next day, he drove off.
But at least we were now getting solar power, even if we couldn't send surplus on the the grid. We'd configured the battery to supply power after dark, so that meant the battery was drained the following morning! I was keeping an eye on it so I could call when it got full but that happened so late in the day he couldn't make it out. Friday was cloudy and Matt called and said I should change the configuration to simply charge the battery off the grid so the test could be done regardless of the weather. However no word from French Broad guy. I decided to just use all we could over the weekend and I'd not use the battery after dark on Sunday so it would be ready for Monday.
Here's a screen shot of the Tesla app Sunday afternoon.
Since exporting to the grid was disabled, the solar panels were throttled to whatever load was needed for the house and battery recharge. I cranked on every use of power I could think of! Mini-split into heater mode. Two space heaters in the upstairs bathroom. That's why the app is showing 6.7 KW of consumption, where typical usage is about 1 KW.
Finally Monday December 15 we got the blessing and new meter. Live in time to be able to claim the tax credit. Yay! And I gotta say that App showing sources and sinks of power is just fascinating. I can watch the power use spike when the espresso machine turns on, and the solar power jump when the sun comes out from behind a cloud.
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