Home Solar Power on New Tool Shed
Above: Slide show of building a solar panel tool shed…to be edited chronologically soon!
With New York State’s NYSERDA solar power tax credit and grant offering due to expire in 2016, and unclear if they’ll be renewing it, we decided finally to add solar power this year to our home, using net metering rather than batteries to balance power consumption and production. This means in northern climates like ours where we have lots of cloudy winter sky and snow cover, we produce our annual electric needs in sunny June through September, saving up credit with the power company, then roll the meter forward during the winter when we’re not producing. Once a year we settle up the difference with the electric company, although they pay us any excess production at wholesale rates, and we have to buy electricity at retail.
Between New York’s tax credits, federal tax credits, and our ability to finance the project on a home equity loan, I estimated that given our electricity rates, we could pay the project back on electricity savings in roughly five years, depending on how good our production was. After that, electricity is free and any excess annual production checks from the electric company are a nominal income.
Coincidentally we also needed to build a tool shed. As hermits living in the woods, rationalizing procrastination for yard niceties like garden sheds is possible…you don’t have suburban neighbor peer pressure. But the delay had finally caught up with us. The butt-ugly tar paper and leftover building materials shack, coated by now with many layers of shredding tarps, was built 19 years ago to protect the cement mixer during house construction. It had finally collapsed in a wet, rotted heap last spring on top of our garden tools, lawnmower, tillers, and log splitter, which of course were sitting on top of hardened bags of cement, lime, disintigrating plastic tarps, building sand, and assorted leftover construction trash. OK, ok, time to clean up our act and look more civilized.
Our original plan was to mount the solar panels on our south-facing, two-story house and or garage roof. But after speaking with solar installer Scott Shipley of Northern Lights Energy, we realized none of the roof surfaces were large enough to accomodate the panels we needed, so we’d have to spread the panels across several roof surfaces in an unattractive way.
He suggested considering building a pole barn style tool shed, larger than we originally planned, and mount the panels on it. This would allow us to remove the snow off the panels if we wanted, and give us the much needed building, with room to spare for lumber now stored in our basement, canoe, firewood, etc. It didn’t cost much more to add that in, and its cost could be included in the state and federal grant application, further discounting its expense. No brainer to figure that out! Plus we really could use the extra covered space.
We reviewed the site with Scott and realized we’d have to cut down three trees blocking sun to the shed, to satisfy grant application requirements. Since the trees’ sizes required we’d have to pay someone to do the cutting, we included removing a fourth diseased maple near the house that had already caused porch damage dropping branches.
In the slide show above you can see that so far we have torn apart the old cement mixer shack and hauled it to the dump; had the trees cut down; finished the grading; and had the shed installed. The shed has pole barn type construction with pressure treated posts, dimensional lumber framing, and metal galvanized aluminum roofing. We’ll be adding stained pine board and batten siding, and a hip roof shed with lattice siding on the north side for firewood, under a separate contract. We’re still waiting on the panels and inverter installation. They’re supposed to be installed over the next seven to ten days if the electric company does the meter upgrade. I’ll post an update when it’s done.
