Alias
Registered User
Quick question. What do you base your permit fees on for a solar installation? Valuation? Electrical? Both? Something else?
Sue
Sue
Mule -Mule said:Valuation of total job cost.
Your not kid'n but isn't that what going green is supposed to do. We all get paid. More jobs for all. Just ask Solyndra.pwood said:valuation of job makes for a good payday. 1 inspection usually. mule,
do charge a plan check fee of 65% of the building permit fee in addition?
They are submitting an application and a book with all the specs. Guy I talked to said no one ever reads it, I told him I would be reading it.Mule said:We do make them provide information on the loads also.........
Pwood -pwood said:valuation of job makes for a good payday. 1 inspection usually.mule,
do charge a plan check fee of 65% of the building permit fee in addition?
True Fatboy, I built an 8,000 foot home in 1982, it had water solar panels on a hillside, the water circulated down into the swimming pool then up into a heat pump under the home, forced air was then blown through the house. At the time I questioned how it would work and was told that these systems are used even in cold country where people could ice skate on the pool and there was enough heat in the bottom of the pool to heat the home. Fortunately the AHJ didn't buy it requiring a backup source so the engineers put electric coils around the heat ducts. this necessitated an 1,100 amp electrical service on the house and you can imagine the cost. I ran into the owner a few years ago, he said the maintenance was horrible and at 10 years the plastic piping and panel construction was so badly deteriorated that he was told that the system had reached it's service life and had to be replaced, he took the whole thing off the hill and now heats with the electrical coils at an average expense of $800 a month (as a point of reverence in this area similar homes I have built with conventional gas HVAC systems average $250 a month).fatboy said:I agree, it will end up not being any different than the solar water heating fad in the early-mid 80's. Govermant rebates at the time were what, 75%? They went up all over......and came down years later. I think your generous in thinking a 10 year payback, in the office we've thought 20-30 maybe.
¹ http://energy.aol.com/2011/10/07/solar-panels-dont-work-and-no-one-knows/In the real world, we are just starting to find out how bogus many of those predictions are. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that panels can degrade as much as 4.5% a year. Or more. Put that in your pro forma and see what your banker and insurance agent -- or Congressman -- say about that.The latest issue of the leading industry trade journal Photovoltaics International, asks the question: "What is the real quality of the products I am buying?"
Short answer: Nobody knows. In Italy last year, "they discovered that after one year in the field, over 90% of the (solar panels) from a one megawatt project began to delaminate and ended up on the ground."
Delaminate: Scientific talk for falling apart. And these panels had all the standard certifications.
In Australia, a leading newspaper called bad solar equipment a "ticking time bomb." PV Magazine recently reported on a German conference where speakers wondered why quality in the photovoltaic industry has yet to reach its epitome." That is a polite way of asking 'when is it going to start?'
As much as we do not know about the problems with solar components before installation, we know even less about how solar panels perform after. That is because until recently we only knew what a system of 10,000 panels was doing all together, not separately. But all the action takes place at the panel level. And if you know nothing about that, you are flying blind.
In 2009, Google found that after it cleaned its panels, energy doubled. Eight months later, it cleaned them again, and energy went up 37%.
Afterward, Google figured out how much they know about what was really happening with its system. Almost nothing.¹
In todays newspaper.........................................................http://www.ocregister.com/news/solar-143461-ocprint-power-energy.htmlThey just had no way of knowing when they needed it. That is because until recently, panel level monitors have not been available for larger systems. Now they are.Today, large system owners are able to know when their systems need cleaning, when they need to replace panels, and which ones to replace.
The stakes are huge.
Increasing production by 1% can increase profits by 10%. So better management pays off very quickly.
And best of all, you don't have your college interns reminding you that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Because now you can.
Ray Burgess is President & CEO of Solar Power Technologies, a Texas-based solar monitoring company that has developed a wireless mesh network to collect data from solar systems.