As I mentioned in the previous post, we are getting solar. There is a substantial amount of paperwork associated with this.

Net metering agreement

First you need to be approved by HELCO, the utility, for net metering. As I mentioned in the first post, this can be a bit iffy since, depending on where you live, there may already be so much solar on the circuit that installing more could lead to more generation than consumption on the local circuit. Since all the solar inverters are adjusting their voltage to push their current onto the grid, if all of them try to do this and there’s not enough consumption, the voltage on the circuit could rise to levels outside the nominal range. I’m not sure there’s any empirical evidence that this actually happens, but for this reason HELCO considers it essential to install some unspecified equipment to handle these situations once the PV penetration goes above some point, like 75% of minimum daytime load.

People are arguing that this is very conservative, because of several reasons. First, they measure the “capacity” of a PV installation by the minimum of the rated output of the PV panels and the inverters. Since PV panels will give rated output only at full insolation at 25 degrees Celsius, in practice the installation will never output anything near this amount. You’d need an absolutely clear sky with the sun shining at the exact normal to the panels and, in the unlikely event that this would happen, the temperature of a roof-mounted photovoltaic panel would be more like 50C, substantially lowering its output. Since every installation is angled differently, it’s not even physically possible for them all to receive maximum light input simultaneously and, finally, this magic day would have to coincide with minimum load. Typically, very sunny days are warm, with associated use of air conditioning, and will not be minimum load days.

All in all, the 75% limit is conservative. (HELCO has just recently started approving systems up to 120% of daytime minimum load, for this reason, but they still require these equipment upgrades.) The hitch is that these unspecified equipment “upgrades” that are necessary are paid by the net metering applicants, so after waiting for a total of 6 weeks for HELCO to process our application, we received a letter stating that their study had concluded that in order to go forward, we’d need to pay them about $900.

Apparently this “fee”, because that is what it is, was approved by the utilities commission to offset the increased costs to the utility from all these people installing PV, a concept known as “cost shifting”. This concept has been promoted by the utilities to claim that it’s the people who can’t afford to install solar that bear the cost of PV installations, since the “freeloaders” with solar don’t have to pay for energy any more. On the one hand, this sounds reasonable — the utility still has to have a grid to supply us with energy, but PV owners don’t pay them more than the fixed cost for the connection. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem to be true, because PV also benefits the utility in several ways. First, in places with hot climates, PV tends to scale with peak load because it comes from air conditioning. This means the utility may be able to avoid installing expensive “peaker plants” to deal with spikes in demand. Another factor is in states with a renewable energy portfolio requirement, PV generation counts toward the required installation of renewable energy, and hence the utility may be able to avoid installing other types of renewable energy generation because of customer-owned PV. One study on behalf of the state of Nevada found that there was no net cost shift onto non-solar customers and if anything, a net benefit to everyone.

Whatever. We paid the $900 extortion money. I would have been more positively inclined if HELCO had actually enclosed the “study” they claimed to have done and the costs of the equipment they claimed they had to buy. As it was, they provided no evidence whatsoever, just a letter that said “we’ve decided you should pay us $900”. Finally, on July 24, we received our notice that our system has been approved for net metering and we may proceed with installation. We sent in our initial application on May 20…

County permits

Beside the net metering agreement, you also need building and electrical permits from the County. This was all handled by ProVision, but they had to document the roof structure and how the panels were to be mounted. Here’s the roof plan from their architect:

This is the roof plan drawn up by ProVision for the PV install. 12 modules are going on the southeast-facing side of the garage roof, the remaining 5 on the southwest-facing side of the roof of the addition.

Apparently the County has been tightening up their rules lately. There didn’t use to be a building permit required for a PV install, but after some incident where a roof collapsed after an installation, ProVision said that they now have to give details on the mounting. In fact, the garage roof is pretty weak. It only has these tiny 2×3 purlins at 40″ spacing, connected to 2×4 rafters at 48″ spacing. The architect decided this was not strong enough and at the same time they upgraded our meter, ProVision also put in reinforced purlins.

The new, stronger purlins that the PV panels will be mounted to. The preexisting ones are the tiny, painted ones.

Instead of the old 2×3’s, we now have 2×6’s and, in some places, 4×4’s. This seems a bit funny, since the trusses are still only 2×4’s, but that’s apparently not a problem.

There was an initial scare when ProVision went to the county to file the building permit, as they initially said the garage was an “unpermitted structure”. This would be more than a little strange, since the County’s own property tax website shows a garage for this property, and it apparently was just a misunderstanding. We finally got word on Friday that the permits were approved, and they will be installing the PV system this next week! Look forward to more pictures!

It’s now been almost 4 months since the last episode of the basement “un-finishing”. We didn’t finish with coating the floor in the room that flooded because I wanted to finish the drainage first. Since that’s now functional, it was time to finish that up.

After one more can of the EpoxyShield, the west room now looks like this:

Finally the floor in the basement room is coated. We did the concrete walls too, just to make it look a bit cleaner.

Once that room had cured, we could now move all the stuff from the south room. To keep the boxes off the floor and get some air circulation around them, we got some shelving and this afternoon, the room looked like this:

After moving all the stuff from the other room and the hallway, the west room is now full of stuff again.

That’s not all the stuff that was in the south room, a lot went into the north room where we now have a dehumidifier running. With all the rain we had a couple of weeks ago, we discovered a lot of stuff had gotten moldy. Things like backpacks and unused cutting boards, but also my motorcycle pants and leather belts. People say it’s basically impossible to not have stuff get moldy in Hilo, especially if you have it in storage. We figured it should be possible by sealing off one room and putting a dehumidifier in it, we could get the humidity down to “mainland values” without paying a fortune in the electric bill. In any case a lot of things that could get moldy is now stored in that room. We’ll see how it works out.

So that meant it was time to rip out the south room, which looked like this:

The south room, with the same white paneling and water damaged carpet as the west room.

This room also has carpet, and it also got waterlogged when the basement flooded back around New Year’s. Time to rip that sucker out. After a bit of demolition work, it now looks like this:

After ripping out the carpet and paneling, we discovered the carpet was laid over linoleum.

The carpet here was actually laid on top of an old layer of linoleum, which is probably why it didn’t get quite as wet. Instead, the water must have seeped mostly under the carpet until it came out in the hallway on the other side of that room. One entire wall is concrete, because the front stairs are on the other side. This concrete was painted white, but the paint was bubbling due to efflorescence in several places, and there was a ton of “organic matter” between the concrete and the paneling. My guess would be decomposed cockroaches, judging from the few identifiable samples…

So now the room looks quite a bit more like a jail cell. But you gotta tear something down before you can build it up, right? Next is to get the floor grinder and take off the linoleum and clean up the concrete. The good part is that in the patches we could see, the floor looks in better shape than it did in the other room, so hopefully it’ll be a bit less work.

It’s been a while since the last update, but not for lack of things happening. As I alluded to in an earlier post, we are going solar! Power here in Hawaii is so expensive that even with the high installation costs of PV panels, they payoff time is only about 6 years when you include the tax breaks. If you ask me, it’s a no brainer, and a lot of people seem to agree with me since Hawaii is leading the country in solar energy. And why shouldn’t we? Most power is generated with oil which is shipped from the mainland, and Hawaii has sunlight to spare.

And you’d better get it while you can! The amount of PV installations have been growing so fast that in many areas it’s up against what the utility says the grid can handle. If you don’t get your system in soon, you might face a situation where you can’t get an agreement to connect your panel to the grid because there would be more generation than the grid can handle. Or so the utility says… renewable energy advocates say they’re putting up artificial blockers to protect their bottom line.

Who knows. In any case, we’re getting it! We asked for quotes back in May and decided to go with ProVision Solar, a long-time Hilo solar installer. It’s not cheap, the cost per installed Watt before any tax breaks comes out to be roughly $5/W, taking into account that our house is old and we needed to do some upgrades first as well. In many states on the mainland, you are also allowed to do at least part of the install yourself, which could bring the installed cost down to maybe $2/W. But not in Hawaii. Ah well, like I said, the payoff time is still about 6 years.

So what’s been happening? The first problem we faced was that our electrical service panel looked like this:

This is how the old electrical service entrance looked, just a round bucket with this super old meter in it.

Out on the wall, there’s just a bucket with the meter in it, hooked up with this super-old looking wire going up to the wires coming in from the street. From the meter, the wire goes in through the wall to our breaker panel, which is completely filled up. This poses several problems: First, there is nowhere to connect the PV generation. And even if there were, you’d have to start running wires from inside the basement over to the detached garage, where the PV panels are going. That would not be an easy wiring job.

Moreover, the garage doesn’t have very good electrical service. There’s a single 14-gauge wire running all the way from the breaker panel, through the basement, up to the attic, across to the garage in a conduit, and then servicing all lights and outlets in the garage. When I tried to run the air compressor in the garage, it would fail to start several times, presumably because of voltage drop in the long wire when it tried to draw startup current. That’s just not going to cut it for any serious workshop work, like airplane building…

The solution is to upgrade the meter panel, put a real main breaker there, and then run one heavy-duty wire from there into the garage and put up a subpanel. The solar power can then feed into the subpanel, and any other power needs could now be easily fulfilled by connecting to that panel. Since one way or another, a wire would have to be run from the garage to the meter, why not make that wire be able to handle all foreseeable needs?

ProVision kindly agreed to do the service upgrade even though they normally don’t do “normal” electrical work, but since it was in support of the PV install, they were OK with it. That is now done.

Here goes the old meter holder. I mean, look at that thing!

The ProVision guys finishing up the installation of the new service panel.

There is now a 100A breaker in by the meter, going in to the old panel. And there’s room for another breaker for the to-be-installed garage subpanel. At this point, we’re waiting on county permits, but more about that in the next post.

Today, the final stretch of pipe was covered with gravel and separator fabric!

Here’s the cleanout at the uppermost end of the pipe poking out of the gravel.

A few days ago it looked like this, when the pipe had been glued together but not yet covered with gravel:

A few days earlier; the final length of pipe glued together and laid down.

The rest of the house now looks like this:

Here’s the west end of the house, with pipe completely covered.

Once the pipe is solidly covered with gravel, I’m going to test the grade by pouring a bit of water into the upper cleanout and make sure it goes all the way. The upper lengths have some parts where the slope is a bit minimal, so it would be good to test it and also to wash out any dirt that’s ended up inside the pipe.

“All” that remains then is mindless shoveling of gravel. The whole trench should get filled up by at least a foot more with the drain rock, and then the original gravel on top. I’m under a bit of pressure to get this done at least for the final length of the pipe, because our electrical meter is on the wall above and we’re having it replaced so we can install solar panels! More on that in a later post.

Today, I hooked up the downspout to the drainage pipe:

The “tightline” connection to the downspout is now complete.

Now we’ll see what happens at the bottom when it rains. I still want to make the pipe end in a “dry well” gravel pit (maybe a good use for all the rocks I’ve dug up) and maybe make a drain hole in the lava wall at the bottom of the lawn so the water doesn’t flood the lawn. But that’s all extra credit. First the perforated pipe needs to get laid down.

We’ve hit the point of no return: perforated pipe is in the ground!

Finally, the first perforated pipe section is in the ground.

It was finally time to add some actual drainage. With the transport sections laid down and covered, it was now time to start adding the perforated pipe. This posed a small dilemma: there’s this “pipe sock” of filter fabric that goes around it, which comes pre-wrapped around a big piece of cardboard. This piece won’t go around the bends, so I waffled a bit until I decided that I’m just going to start on the uppermost section I’ve laid down and deal with the problem later. The sock is big enough for 4″ pipe, so there’s quite a lot of slack so it won’t be hard to thread it along the pipe after gluing the bends on.

Gluing the pipe sections in the trench, by the way, is not so easy. You can’t stand in the trench, because the pipe is going there, so you end up splaying yourself on your knees across the trench, bending down to the pipe, and then trying to get the pipe glue on and the pipe in position. Highly frustrating.

Around the sock goes the gravel. Once I started shoveling the gravel, I noticed that even though it’s “drain rock”, it still has quite a lot of grit in it. I ended up washing it with the hose in the wheelbarrow. This would work better if the wheelbarrow was perforated so the grit just drained out. I’m not ready to start drilling holes in it yet, though, even though it was ~$35…

Finally, around the gravel, goes this “soil separator” fabric. This part is kind of a pain in the ass. You’re supposed to put this under the pipe, then add gravel until the pipe is covered, and then fold it over so grit and dirt can’t get into the gravel. The problem is that with the fabric in the trench, it folds over on itself automatically, so how are you supposed to get the gravel down? It took another good dose of frustration before this was done.

This shows the layout: the sock around the pipe in the center, then the gravel, and then the soil separator fabric on the outside.

Once the fabric is folded over on itself, you can finally lock it in place with some gravel and then start filling with more gravel in a slightly more efficient manner. This is what it looks like currently:

At this point, the pipe along the side of the house is fully covered. Remains to hook up the downspout to the T in the bottom of the picture.

The pipe is now sufficiently covered that it’s possible to walk on it, so the next step is to hook up the downspout to the T below the perforated pipe so it can drain down to the bottom of the lawn instead of through the super-temporary pipe in the top of the picture.

The drainage project is getting to the point that I’m now putting stuff into the ground as opposed to taking it out. It’s like we’ve crested and started going downhill…

After making sure that the trench has sufficient slope, I started burying the pipe, starting from the lower end. If you start at the bottom you know you can maintain slope by adding fill, so this should be safe. At the end, the pipe is almost on top of the ground, so there’s not much to do there.

The bottom outlet pipe, going almost down to the edge of the lawn, is half-visible at the end.

Where it crosses the lawn, I filled with packed dirt and replaced the cut out grass tufts that I dug up. It’s not invisible, but hopefully the grass will re-grow and cover it.

Where the pipe crosses the lawn, the saved tufts of grass have been replaced.

The pipe is glued together all the way up until where the Y will go, and the trench has been partially filled back so the pipe has support.

The PVC pipes are “welded” together with cement that must be something very similar to what you use to build model airplanes. You smear it onto both parts and quickly push the pipe into the fitting, and seconds later they are a solid piece. It’s almost too fast, I’m worried I won’t have time to put them into the correct position before the glue freezes, but so far it’s worked OK.

I also painted the foundation with “Drylok”, a masonry waterproofer. This should prevent the concrete from absorbing moisture from the dirt around it, but the real problem is down at the bottom of the trench. There are holes between the rocks that are part of the foundation, and during the last big rainfall, I saw water coming out of these holes when I pumped the trench dry, so that means water is presumably coming in the same way and collecting under the house. If the water is flowing in under the house, it won’t rise enough to go into the drainage pipe, so this seems like a suboptimal situation.

My attempt at a solution is to use Water-stop Cement, which is a rapid-setting cement mix meant for plugging water. When mixed with water, this makes a putty that can be pressed into cracks and that hardens in a few minutes. This way, at least the most obvious cracks can be plugged. The picture shows the white Drylok and the cement plugs are visible around the rocks at the bottom.

This is the foundation wall treated with the white Drylok, and the gray water-stop cement used to plug the cracks around the rocks at the bottom of the trench is visible at the bottom.

Finally, we also now have gravel, 9 tons of 1.5″ washed drain rock (though these “tons” are 2000lbs, so that’s actually only 8.2 “real” (metric) tons.) 9 tons sounds like a lot, but it’s not as much as it sounds… This means we now have everything we need to finish this project on site, so now it’s only up to us!

9 tons of 1.5″ drain rock, ready to break some backs…

The drainage work continues, but now I’m really seeing the end. After the demolition work in the last post, I continued to dig down along the side of the house. About where there’s some rock poking up through the lawn, I ran into the rock, too. Not entirely unexpected. Continuing to dig, the rock dropped away and I decided it was time to leave the house and head across the lawn to make it to the property line before running into the cesspool… Once I had a trench going across the lawn and down the side a bit, it was finally almost at ground level.

Now “all” that remained to finalize the trench was another round with the demolition hammer. I did 6 hours yesterday, and 3 hours more today, of breaking up some rock, putting a pipe in, and measuring the slope. After a whole lot of sweat, dirt, (but no tears or significant amounts of blood yet), the trench is now pretty much graded. Here’s what the side of the house looks like now:

Finally, I can put a length of pipe into the trench and have it slope basically downhill the entire way.

The trench crossing the lawn and out into the planter bed along the property line.

After evaluating various online advice, I decided to not use the 4″ corrugated plastic pipe after all. Apart from people saying it crushes easily, because it’s flexible it would be very difficult to get it to maintain an even grade when the trench is so uneven as this one is. Instead, I got 50 feet of 3″ perforated PVC pipe at HPM. Since this is rigid, it’s easy to tell what the slope is and if it’s evenly supported. I cut the appropriate lengths and test-fitted it around the house.

The pipe along the front of the house, with a cleanout access at the corner (next to the one for the cast iron sewage pipe from the kitchen.)

The little “Christmas tree” in the middle of the pipe is for joining the pipe from the downspout.

Down the side of the house, I’m only using perforated pipe for the first 10 feet. After that, the pipe runs in the trenched-out bedrock, so there should be no significant amounts of water coming in there. This also allows me to join the pipe from the downspout and let them both use the same final transport pipe down to the edge of the property. I added two 45-degree tees that will simultaneously make an entry for the downspout pipe and an access hole.

What you really don’t want happening is having the water from the downspout back up and flood the perforated section of the pipe. That’s why I’m running the downspout pipe underground in parallel with the perforated pipe until maybe 3ft past the perforated section before joining them. Since there’s an access hole, it will also be possible to check that the water isn’t backing up into the perforated pipe.

Now that I’ve test fitted the pipe and verified that the grade is basically OK the entire way (the final adjustment will be done by adding back some fill to the sections that don’t have enough slope) it’s time to start gluing the pipe together and filling it up, starting from the bottom. Maybe there’s an end to this project, too.