In addition to my SolarCity collectors I built an additional collector / yard art / garden shade. I saw something similar online and I thought “I need to build one of those.”

Yes – this is as simple as it looks. It’s 4 240 watt panels bolted together in a diamond. They are mounted on a 2 inch pipe. The 4 panels are connected in parallel and connected to a 1KW grid tie inverter that is plugged into a wall socket on my deck. It’s very simple. The sun shines on it, it makes DC power (40 volts / 20 amps) and the inverter turns it into AC power that is fed back into the grid. If the house is using less power than the collector it runs the meter backwards.

Technically this is a 1000 watt system. But in reality at the peak of the day I get about 750 – 800 watts of real power back into the grid so I’m calling it 800 watt.

The construction was fairly simple. I start with a 2″ pipe 10′ long and stuck 3 1/2 feet into the ground in concrete. The hole was about 18″ diameter. You want a lot of weight down there to handle the wind load. I also filled the pipe with concrete to stiffen it up. On top of that is a plumbing union, then 2 more feet of 2″ pipe and a 2″ tee. Then I reduce from 2″ to 1″ pipe. Used a 3″ nipple on both ends and into 2 more unions. Then that goes to 2 5′ lengths of 1″ galvanized steel pipes.

At the 4 corners that the pipe passes over I have L shaped brackets that I got at Home Depot and I drilled holes in them so I could bolt the pipe to the panels using 1 1/4 inch muffler clamps.

The unions act like bearings and when loosened allow the collector to be rotated horizontally using the 2″ union, and vertically using the two 1″ unions.

Then for decoration I made a bracket out of PVC fittings I bought at Lowes to mount the sun sconce in the middle.

Then I wired the sun sconce to the PVC mount and snapped it on the 1″ pipe and turned it into yard art.

You might be wondering – why build an additional system when I already have one from SolarCity? The Solar City install is much bigger and it’s 14 panels and works great. But I wanted to generate more power than needed. SolarCity usually right sizes the system so that you generate just a little less than 100% so as to be the most economical. But to me I wanted to make more power just because – and money wasn’t the most important factor. I might use some electric heat instead of gas if I feel like I need to use up the excess. Or I can just give it to PG&E cheap. PG&E pays 4 cents a KWH which isn’t the kind of price you make money from.

For what it’s worth I’m very happy with PG&E. They have been very pro solar. I even read somewhere where the president used to work for one of the big phone companies and said he saw what cell phones did to land lines and decided that solar is the coming thing and PG&E needs to be part of the future. So I don’t mind giving them some low cost power.

Also – I have a shading issue with my roof top install and in the middle of the afternoon the power output drops off. So I wanted an extra collector that would make additional power on those hot summer days.

And – this is Gilroy California and it’s hot and dry in the summer. My experience is that almost everything in the garden burns up in the hot Gilroy sun. So I’m adding some shade to see if that helps.

For what it’s worth, I think PG&E should pay a little more at peak demand times. That would create an incentive for people like me to see if I can make power when they need power on those hot summer days when everyone has the air conditioning cranked up. It could help them meet their peak demand and be able to make sure everyone has power without having to build more power plants.