Had a bit of an anxiety inducing scare with the solar install.
As far as I knew, we were on schedule. Engineering is supposed to sign off on the design by the first week in October and then the permitting process can begin, with the install to happen in the beginning of November.
One step we did complete was having someone out to mark the private utilities. In North Carolina there is a service called 811 for marking public utilities (buried power lines, buried fiber, etc) but things like septic fields and water lines (from our well) are considered private utilities, so I had to pay someone to come out to mark them.
It turns out that we need the cable to go straight through our septic field, which is a bit of a no-no, so I measured a route that would go around the field to get to the house. The length is about 225 feet and, with approximately 60 feet to cover through the drop ceiling in the basement, that should still be considerably less than the 400 foot run the inverter can handle.
Yesterday I got the following note:
Our team has reviewed your trenching path and has determined that we will need to reassess the location of your array as the maximum trench length per Tesla requirements is 125 feet. Is there an alternative location that you would like to relocate this array to to ensure that it is within this 125 foot code requirement?
What?!?
There is literally no good way to put a roughly 60x12 foot array that close to the house. One reason we went with this company was because they were confident they could do a ground-based install at our location.
I have the mobile number for our sales guy, Aaron, and he quickly talked me off the ledge. No, he said, the engineering team just made a mistake as while we are using a Tesla battery the job is quoted for a SolarEdge inverter. That is the inverter that can handle the 400 feet.
After an anxious 24 hours or so, our project manager confirmed that the currently location is fine. (sigh)
Now I just need to get them to sign off on the whole design and I’ll get my guy out to start trenching. Here’s hoping the rest goes smoothly.