I got the meters installed today. It took about 2 minutes of work, after 2 weeks of wait.
The meter on the left is the “production” meter which measures how much power the panels have made over their lifetime, period. It’s so the utility knows what they got for their rebate money. (Oddly, it’s the exact same Centron C1SC meter I had previously, for usage measurements!) The meter on the right is the net meter. Today it’s running backwards, even though it’s cloudy, because the house is pretty much at base load.
All that’s left is the anti-islanding inspection*, but my installer tells me the utility is OK with having them on prior, so we’re up and running! On a cloudy day, of course.
I don’t yet have the official Enlighten URL for the array, but my homebrew monitoring is here on pachube.com.
*And one concern about the physical install of the panels & cables, which might possibly require removal and re-fastening of the panels, which would just be awful at this point.
Edit: The official monitoring site is now active.
Congrats on getting online officially with Xcel! After a three-week wait on Xcel here in Colorado, they installed our new meter today, June 28, 2010 and we pumped out 32.4 kWh of electricity with our 5.59 kW system on a completely blue-sky Colorado day!
BTW, we only have one meter, which I’ve been calling the “net” meter, but maybe I’m mislabeling it. It looks like your “production meter”. Or maybe ours is both a net meter and a production meter? You can take a look if you want:
http://solarchargeddriving.com/editors-blog/on-going-solar/384-officially-on-grid-and-halfway-to-solar-charged-driving.html
That’s funny that we got the meters on the same day, too ;)
I got a whopping 9kWh today, but it was cloudy… no way I’ll compete with your array though ;)
I’ll have to look up what the C1SR meter is, I guess it must be a net meter if that’s the only one on the premises.
I guess the production meter is specific to the MN program…