We took ownership of our new house a couple of days ago and one of the multitude of tradesmen to pay us a visit in this time was an inspector from Braemac who did an inspection of our roof for a potential rooftop PV system. Half of our roof area is north facing (I’m in the southern hemisphere) which is idea for a solar install. The roof itself is “colourbond” which is a trademark name for painted galvanised iron with an orb profile and the roof surface is pitched at 30 degrees. Basically this means the install is quite simple with no need for tilted mounts for the solar panels and no need for any tedious mucking about with a tiled roof.

I’ve asked for the Sunnyboy Inverter (a 4.2KW unit) to be installed in our garage rather than on the side of the house next to the power meter. This was for two reasons, firstly it helps protect the hardware from the elements. Secondly, it stops an expensive bit of hardware being visible from the road and potentially being stolen. The Braemac inspector said this would be no problem and that the install was actually quite simple and would result in our initial cost of the system being a little lower. Lower cost is always good 🙂

Next thing for me to do is find a bluetooth dongle for my PC. The Sunnyboy Inverter (a SMA SB4000TL-20 to be exact) has built in bluetooth for remote monitoring purposes and I’d be neglectful not to be monitoring the PV system output during the day. More on this later.