zanydroid
Solar Wizard
I'm sure you've seen my technical analysis and opinions on this on the other threads so I won't repeat them.I keep seeing mention of suddenly stopping a large load (EV charger, 4 ton AC unit, etc.) can cause some brief power to export back to the grid, but also it looks like there's some updates happening that might have fixed that? Is this still an issue to be concerned about with the 18kPV?
I'm looking at a large build that would be self sufficient for 99.X% of the year, but ideally I'd like to have the grid feeding into the 18kPV for those extremely rare times (once or twice every few years) my array & battery wouldn't be able to keep going. However, if it has a chance to backfeed that's not an option as it just adds more cost and easily 3-6 months waiting for the utility company to approve it.
If you really are sized big enough to not draw from grid why not double convert? The reduction from 100% efficiency of pass through to 80% of double convert sucks but you will rarely pay it.
NEM3 is pretty solar friendly IMO.
PG&E pre approved my new NEM2 in March 2023 in not much more than a month and did PTO on my old NEM2 in November 2022 in about a month too. You can look up the costs assessed to get to PTO, pretty sure it's less than $500
Your AHJ permit will likely take about as long as the initial pre approve. My AHJ has decided to discount solar permits pretty heavily.
That leaves planset ($750 is what I paid in May) and engineer stamp if your AHJ requires ($300 for a basic design). TBH if you are DIY for first time you can call the $750 tuition to teach and derisk the project, I was happy to pay it.
It does suck that your $20k project (18kpv, powerpro, $10k of panels and balance of system) increases by $1500 in soft costs, but in the grand scheme of construction overhead that is under 10%, less than the California sales tax on the materials...
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