Originally, this job was only supposed to take three days, so for obvious reasons we were anxious to finish.
The day would prove to be exceptionally frustrating.
One of the first issues we ran into was our spools of 2/0 battery cable. We didn’t even think about what the 18-20 degree nighttime temperature would do to them, so we left them outside on the truck with the idea that in the morning, we would make our custom cables out at the truck where all the crimp tools were rather than carry all that crap up the hill to the already cramped inverter “room”.
Now, we use a really flexible, high quality MTW ultra fine strand wire for our battery cables. It’s like welding cable but with the MYW rating needed for permanent installations.
Well, that shit was frozen stiff! There was no way we would be able to manipulate it into the tight spaces where it had to go, so we measured off what we needed-which wasn’t easy because the crap was like a giant heavy slinky-cut it and carried it up the hill and turned a heater on it.
Once it was limber enough to terminate, we did that, but it was still too stiff to really work with, so back to the heater. Did I mention there’s reasons we don’t normally work in this kind of weather?🙄
While that was going on and we were working on the last details needed to power up the system, I called the county building inspector to touch base with him and see about what time he thought he’d be there as Denise had put in for a later inspection.
He reported that we were first in his list, he was just a few minutes away, and that if we weren’t done-which we definitely were not done-we would fail inspection.
Fuck.
We frantically started hucking tools and parts into boxes and made the installation look as done and clean as possible literally as he was pulling into the driveway. 🙄
Now, we really were done with the physical installation except for the cantankerous battery cables and installing all the covers , and it looked about like this.
Fortunately, the inspector was not really cool about everything, but he liked what he saw. Additionally, he had questions about what was required for solar system safety stickers-which is actually a very hard to understand topic, and even I’m confused half the time as to what stickers are supposed to go where-so I spent some time doing my best to educate him on why the stickers are needed, what they actually mean, and where they need to be placed.
My last card to play was perhaps a bit sneaky and misleading, although not wrong-we had one of those little 600watt “solar generators “ currently hooked up to the systems generator input to run lights and test, and it turns out that actually powers up the buildings inverter, and due to the small, silent nature of the external battery pack generator, it appears that the inverter is actually producing the power and powering up the building, so I was able to point at the inverter’s touchscreen and demonstrate “yeah look, it’s working. “ which technically it WAS, as it was passing the power through as designed. When I showed him our frozen battery cables thawing in front of the heater as the only thing stopping us from connecting the already installed batteries, he seemed agreeable to signing off on it because he could clearly see the system was running and hadn’t burnt anything down.
But maybe what really sealed the deal is when him and Denise started talking about their recent elk hunts-he perked right up! This isn’t the first time that hunting stories have helped us with inspectors, customers or contractors, and makes me feel like hunting expenses are a legitimate business write off. 🤷♂️
Anyway, he happily signed off on our final inspection, and an hour or so later we had the batteries all hooked up and the system up and running and we figured we’d be packing up to leave in short order.
Turns out we were wrong. 😬😬😬
