Pour! And solar!

[elizilla]

When I last posted, we were worried about drainage, swales, holes in the basement wall, etc. That’s all done. The holes are filled, the pipes laid, the trenches filled, and Steve has started putting our landscaping back together. All drainage swales are working. We have passed a number of inspections for plumbing, subsoil, footings, etc. Today they poured the concrete! It was much less dramatic than our house was back in 2016. No pumping machine, just two cement trucks. They pulled each truck up in turn, into our neighbor’s parking lot, and ran the concrete in through a chute over the fence. Four guys got it all in place and smoothed down, the anchor bolts installed, etc. It looks good.

Next they will peel off the forms, install the exterior insulation, and backfill the dirt around the edges. The SIP wall panels are due in early September.

In completely separate construction news, our rooftop solar and battery backup went live today after passing their inspection this morning. Our house is running on battery power right now, and we just sailed through our first short power outage. A tiny storm blew through and took out our neighborhood for a few minutes. We don’t yet have the monitoring app, yet so we can’t examine it in detail. They are supposed to be emailing me the setup info and I can’t wait to get it! We are also waiting for DTE to come out and do their bit to our meter. Until then we can’t sell power back to the grid. But our battery charged today and has been running the house since sunset, that part is live.

Comments

[the_rigger]

Hopefully the MPSC won't let DTE abuse you so badly with the proposed rate increase and changes to the DEO credit that it destroys the financial benefits of the solar array. I've been following that story on NPR/MPR lately... What a bunch of crooks.

-R
(thank Geddikins i'm on Consumers...)

[elizilla]

The way to fend off DTEs abuse is to do our best to avoid selling our power back to them. Between the house battery, the car charging, and being strategic with our consumption timing, I expect we can play this game decently.