SolarYpsi

The graphs that have been running for about a year for the Ypsilanti Food Cooperative are now running for the City Hall installation. Select ‘Ypsilanti City Hall (Live)’ from the drop down on the side of the SolarYpsi.org homepage to take a look for yourself.

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After about three years of effort by *lots* of people, we can all be proud that the City of Ypsilanti City Hall is now solar powered.

DTE came last Friday and installed the generation meter and commissioned the system. I stopped by on Saturday and can see that we’re generating power. The generation meter is what’s coming from the solar panels and as of about Saturday afternoon we had already generated 5 KWH of power. The other two meters are of the power we purchased from DTE (1.7*80) 136 KWH and any power we exported back to the utility grid (0*80) zero.

If you haven’t seen the pictures of the installation process, you can still find them, on the SolarYpsi.org website.

With the meters installed we have one last task to complete for this project. We need to connected the meter reading laptop to the utility meters and continuously read the meters and post the information to SolarYpsi.org so we all can watch the power being generated day after day. This will also help us understand the power being consumed by City Hall and maybe we can find ways to make it more efficient.

As always, thank you for supporting this project. We’ll have an “official” unveiling once the meters are displaying power on the website.

Just wanted to update everyone on two topics.

First, if you’re following the solar graphs for the Coop, you might notice that some days there is zero solar energy generated. This is because the new inverter we installed “buzzes” quite a bit more then the older inverter. The buzzing only happens when its cloudy, but its very annoying and the staff have been turning it off on cloudy days. It should get better once we get more sunny days this spring. We are also making plans to move the inverter outside.

Second, City Hall is still not turned on. DTE came the other day to install the meters and commission the system, but there was a mix-up and they brought the wrong type of meter and it wouldn’t fit the in the meter enclosure we provided. We’re working on straightening it out.

I’ve uploaded new pictures of the 12 panels on the Ypsi Food Coop’s new white roof. There are also new pictures of the bakery’s new white roof and a prototype solar panel rack. Once the weather gets a little warmer we can start installing the 30 panels on the bakery.

I’ve added a few more pictures to the City Hall site. The system is fully installed, inspected and tested. I need one more piece of paper signed by the City lawyer, then we can go into full production. Then another week or so for us to finish installing testing the monitoring system.

I’ve also added links to the City Hall rack design drawings. I hope they help with other projects.

Lastly, I’ve update the grant progress reports for both the City Hall and Bakery projects.

Thanks for your support. – Strenski

The Ypsilanti Food Coop is getting a new roof today and the roofers needed to get under the solar panels, so around noon we turned them off and took the rack apart. The roofers worked quickly and we were able to put the rack back together and turn the panels back on around 6:00pm.

The old roof was black and the new roof is white. This should boost our production of solar power with more reflective light hitting the panels.

We had hoped to install the solar panels on the back of City Hall yesterday, but did not have enough time to finish.

Here’s a short summary yesterday’s work. Initially we had hoped to raise the frame for the solar panels in one piece. We could easily lift it, but the frame was too flexible, so we disconnected the frame into 3 pieces and raised the center frame. The lift we rent worked great, but it only gives us access to about 1/3 of the wall at a time. We temporary pinned the frame to the wall with some mechanical anchors, while trying to get the frame level and plumb. This proved difficult from the lift. We had to use ropes from the roof to raise and lower the frame, to tweak it into the correct location.

With a couple of mechanical anchors and ropes holding the center section of the frame in place, we drilled the holes for the Hilti HY Max 150 epoxy anchors. These too proved to take longer then expected working from the lift. We drilled, brushed, and blew-out a dozen holes and epoxied in a bunch of anchors. Then we repeat for another bunch of anchors. The epoxy sets up in 1 hour so after lunch we were able to torque down these anchors. We had a few that did not hold, so we had to clean the holes and re-epoxy the anchor.

The metal that is up there is well anchored to the wall. The volunteer crew, is back to work on their normal jobs and we returned the lift. I’m going to talk with the crew later this week, and schedule another day to hopefully finish hanging the panels.

Tim Neff, the electrician for the project, stopped by yesterday to look at his part of the job again. He also pulled the electrical permit for the project. He too is busy, but said he would like to start in a couple of weeks. He’ll need to run conduit from the back wall, through the boiler room, to the electrical room. He’ll also need to run conduit from the electrical room out to the utility meter on the back wall.