New Blog

Hi All, whether you're just now seeing this blog for the first time or have been following it for a while, we obviously haven't been keeping it up to date, however, we've started a new blog that we'd love to have you come visit.  We'll try to keep it updated and it's more generic related to "Green" things.  Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy coming up with various articles.

Please visit www.SwayneyShadeofGreen.com

Thanks All!

2 mwh !!!

We just completed our second mwh!  The production is really starting to pick up now that the sun is getting higher and days are getting longer.  We're excited to see what this thing will pump out this summer, bring on the sunshine!

Water System

Not sure if I've talked much about our water treatment system.  The same week we moved in we had an Iron Shield with Toxin Guard filtration system installed by Easywater.  It doesn't use chemicals or anything it simply removes stuff from the water and then every couple of night does a backwash to clean itself.  (pictured below, tall black tank).
It only uses a few watts of power for the lit display, it uses a little more power to run the pumps during backwash cycle but only about like running a light bulb for the time it does the cleaning.









My latest addition as of yesterday 2/15 was an electronic descaler (water softener).  This was an easy do-it-yourself addition, it uses wire coils wrapped around the incoming water supply line, it then creates a magnetic field which changes the physical structure of calcium and other elements that cause hard water.  It doesn't remove anything from the water like the salt systems but at the same time it doesn't add back anything either, like salt.  The modified elements are supposed to be less "sticky" after passing through the coils so that they don't build up or bond to surfaces.  They say it may take a couple months before we notice the difference, so more to come on this one.
Update:  for those curious it does run continuously but only uses 3 watts of power, I check and track everything I plug in to see what the power consumption will be.

1 mWh

We reached our 1st mWh today!  Right after installing the system we wondered how long it would take to produce our first mWh and decided we'd make that a little milestone of ours.  So its been about 2.5 months but they have been the shortest days of the year so we can't wait to se how they do this summer!

I just wanted to edit the post about the 1 mWh and include a photo of the Enphase unit showing 1.01mWh!!!

Counting to a mWh

We are counting up to our first mWh, we're sitting at 978 kWh, unfortunately it was cloudy today and supposed to be raining some tomorrow....Sat is supposed to be perfectly clear, I've seen 22 kWh on a clear day in the last couple of weeks so I think we might be celebrating a megawatt Saturday!  I'll post again when we do!

So Close!

We're getting so close to our Megawatt of solar power!!!  As of 3:30 PM today (2/3/13) we're sitting at 914 kWh since the system was turned on, we're making close to 20 kWh per day on sunny days, so it might be this week!  Excited!

Half way there!

We finished out 2012 by reaching our half way mark on our goal of a producing a megawatt of power, by the end of the day 12/31/12 we had made just over 500 kWh!  At this rate if we get some sunny days we might hit one megawatt by February, yeah!