tamaracksolar.com
Ground mounts are quickly becoming one of the main expenses if a system. Quality ones already cost as much as the panels.
There's currently no way of getting a price on their site for 48 panels, I filled out the request for qoute form though. Thanks for the tip!
Adjustable :$6,480.00
All I have ever installed. My experience with the support from Tamarak is excellant, They will talk directly to the building code dept. in any juristiction to get you through the permit process.
Ballast is a great option if one can't easily dig, but why PT wood and not steel if you're going the DIY route? (galvanised or otherwise). At this stage (I have both a non-galvanised painted mount and a galvanised one) I'd choose galvanised. Far less maintenance required.
Mostly because I'm pretty good at working with wood and less so with metal. Also, while I note PT wood, here in Maine we often build external structures with green hemlock, which I have on my land. It ages like iron (and becomes difficult to work after about 6-12 months) but it survives all but ground contact well. So, I might have a friend mill out some green hemlock and use that, with ground contact PT just serving as a barrier with the ground. If I need to replace those ground pieces every 10 years I won't much care. Metal isn't out of the running - I just have access to a lot of wood.
I took the design linked below and made it out of wood, I'm making another out of steel by fall.
diysolarforum.com
I'm leaning in that direction right now because the cost of the ground mounts is staggering....
Same here.. No clue how metal goes together but I could probably build you just about anything you could think of from wood! hahaha
Floating slab? You mean build a form and pour concrete inside? Seems pretty simple to me
My local jurisdiction requires anything over 6 feet tall to be engineered.
Yes, like a concrete patio.
There are pros and cons to it, but the only codes we have are for plumbing and what's called shoreland zoning (what you build/do within x feet of a body of water, which doesn't apply to this part of the property). What makes me chuckle a bit is that amazingly our structures still somehow survive just fine, and as a volunteer firefighter I haven't seen any higher rate of fires and safety issues than seems to exist in areas with strict codes on everything one does. To a large degree, we have a culture of "don't try to protect me from me" and I think I prefer that.
It will be on gravel. Given the large amount of ledge in that area, I'm not too worried about frost heave as the only earth likely to shift is the top two feet (including the gravel), and that would be minimal. If it racks, will keep panels far enough apart to avoid damage from hitting each other.
That ground mount looks bad ass
