Yesterday morning dawned cold and overcast with obvious scattered showers all around.

Great.
Perfect day to commission a power system that needs sunlight to make energy. 🙄
Nevertheless, rain or shine, this show had hit a point where it had to go on.
We got busy triple checking all our work, keeping an eye on the threatening skies all around us.
One of our bigger tasks for the day was to torque check all wiring termination points. This helps us to make sure that not only is everything properly terminated, it forces us to slow down and take time to put our eyes and hands on pretty much every square inch of the install. This helps us to just inspect everything for missing or crossed up wiring, missing fasteners, or pretty much anything that might need attention.
Things were going pretty good, with the expected little additions and tweaks here and there. Until…

This 480 breaker broke.
Shit.
In case you’re wondering, you can’t just go down to your local store and pick up one of these, and they are kinda expensive.
It’s a bit hard to see, but if you look close, the top terminal with the brown wire broke, then twisted and displaced the top case of the breaker while we were torquing it.
I determined that the wire and terminal were sound enough to withstand power up and testing, but would need replaced. I sent some pictures along with an explanation of what had happened to our vendor, who in turn contacted the manufacturer. Throughout the day, multiple communications went back and forth until I finally got a phone call where it was explained to me that this is a rare but known issue with these breakers. ( of course, we always get the rare or “ this NEVER happens!” Issues. Seriously. ) and they would locate the appropriate repair parts and overnight them to us.
Anyway, all that could be done about that had been done, and we kept on keeping on.

The next issue we ran across was a real doozy.
And it’s a mistake that was so avoidable it’s almost comical.
And the solution is both simple and complicated at the same time.
I’ll try and explain it.
The picture above is of the old soft start that runs the 40 HP deep well pump. It works fine, that’s not the issue.
The issue is it’s not even in the same building that the blueprints say it’s in!
That’s a problem because the electrical contractor that did all the building wiring on a different phase of this project ran the new power wiring that our solar system ties into per plans-which means that they wired up some random motor soft starter that used to run some other pump, but not the necessary deep well pump.
It’s not the contractors fault-the prints clearly show the starter in the building he wired to, and the starter he wired to is the only one in that building.
It’s not our fault-that part of the job was out of our scope of work.
The thing that makes this so laughably stupid, is that had anybody on the job had been paying attention local personnel turn this pump on 2 to 4 times a week. All somebody would’ve had to have done was asked one of the operators or just been paying attention while they were working and they would’ve noticed What Equipment was actually being used to turn this pump on. I did not notice it until today because it turns out the two buildings are very close to one another and entrances to both of them were out of our view during the entire project and they kept opening a door to the building that everything was wired to as well so I assumed that that’s how they were running the pump.
Until I had an operator walk me through their process so that I could run some electrical tests and prepare to change over the wiring yesterday morning during system, commissioning and testing.
Oh crap!
The solution is simple run wiring to the correct soft start control panel. It is also complex because the two buildings are separated by about 20 feet very crowded dirt with a lot of underground utilities. It’s further complicated by the fact that this is gonna have to be a change order. It’s nobody’s fault but whoever did the drawings. The last change order we needed. Took two months to get approved. For us, this project basically has to be tested by the end of day today. So we have a big problem.
To further underscore the magnitude of the issue-that deep well pump is what this entire project and all of its funding hinges on.
And we need to load test the pump to make sure the new power system will play nice with it, as well as disconnect the existing generator from its current system and tie it into the inverters to make sure it plays nice.
If we connect the generator to our system, which we are set up to do, the deep well pump will be rendered useless, leaving this facility without its primary reason for existing.
Shit.
So all of this is out of our scope of work-but directly affects our ability to actually commission our system-and THAT has to be completed today.
What a mess. 🙄
While all that was coming unraveled, we were marching forward with final preparations to power up the solar system.
The weather was uncooperative.

We got rained on hard enough at one point that we were scrambling to put covers on all of the sensitive electronics.

Something had to be done to regain control of the day, and raise our spirits, so we raised our Jolly Chicken flag. 🐔 😄😄🤷‍♂️

We finished our final preparations just as the engineers showed up to help us start powering up the system.

This in and of itself was a pretty special event. Normally, an installation this small doesn’t get this kind of support. We happen to be lucky-the head engineer is a friend of ours who not only used to work for our solar supplier, but he is also the one who designed this entire system, so he was here as a special favor to us and because he wanted to see us and this project. This guy is well known and respected in the industry, and he’s wicked sharp and very good at problem solving. We’re very lucky and grateful.

Our next potential issue was “black starting” the batteries. In an odd twist of technical details, these batteries, for all their massive power storage, need external 208 power to be able to turn on. Now, normally this isn’t an issue: the batteries power the inverters which in turn power the 208 system which in turn power the battery management system… but how to actually start this whole mess?!
Fortunately, the batteries have an onboard UPS system designed for just this situation, which is called a black start.
The problem is-these batteries have been sitting for about a year at this point, and it’s unknown if the UPS batteries have enough charge to black start the system. And the batteries are buried deep within the cabinets.
Oh the irony of batteries needed to operate batteries!😄😄🤷‍♂️

So the big question-did this damn solar system power up?!
Did it blow up?!
Did we do everything right?!
Were we heros or zeros?
Stay tuned…