Evan from Manalapan, NJ has been a Green Sun Energy Services client since May of 2019. He and Rachel bought the array and the generator within a fortnight of each other and both went live in the first week of August; the roof followed a year later.
36 panels and 11.7 kW
Live on 5 August 2019: 36 Hanwha Q.PEAK DUO 325-watt modules on a SolarEdge inverter, 11.7 kW rated, estimated at 12,302 kilowatt hours in the first year. The inverter is deliberately oversized against the array rather than matched to it, which costs a little at the outset and leaves room afterwards – for panels added later, or simply for an inverter that spends less of its life at full stretch.
A 22 kW Generac, retrofitted
The next day. A Generac rated 19.5 kW on natural gas – 22 kW on propane – retrofitted to the existing 200-amp panel behind a managed whole-house transfer switch with a smart management module. The load survey is the interesting part of this one: 2,860 square feet, but with two refrigerators, a separate freezer, a dishwasher, a washer, an electric dryer, a five-ton air conditioner, a sump pump and a double electric oven. Electric drying, electric cooking and central air on one machine is close to the worst case for a standby generator, because all three are large, all three are resistive or motor loads, and any two of them together can approach the output of everything else in the house combined. That is what the management module is there to referee.
3,800 square feet of new roof
September of 2020, in hunter green, warranted fifty years, with high-impact resin soffit vents at the intake. Worth noting that this is the reverse of the order we would normally advise – roof first, panels afterwards – and it was a reasonable call at the time, because the survey done for the array the year before found the existing roof sound. Roofs are replaced for reasons other than age, and when the decision arrives after an array is already up, the work has to be planned around a live system rather than a bare deck.
Why the array and the generator were bought together
They were signed a fortnight apart and commissioned a day apart, which is a household that had understood the distinction. A grid-tied array does not run during an outage – the inverter shuts down with the grid, so that no house is feeding power back to anyone working on the lines. The panels cut the bill on the other three hundred and sixty-four days and contribute precisely nothing on the night the power goes. In a house that cooks and dries with electricity, that night is the one worth buying a machine for.
Project Facts
- Location
- Manalapan, NJ
- Services
- Roofing Installation, Solar Panel Installation, Standby Generator Installation, Standby Generator Service
- Client since
- May 2019
Solar
- Panels
- Hanwha Model # Q.PEAK DUO-G5.325
- Panels
- 36
- System size
- 11.70 kW
- Inverter
- SolarEdge SE10000H-US000NNC2
- Mounting system
- Ecolibrium Solar
- Estimated first-year production
- 12,302 kWh
- Share of the home's electricity
- 99%
- Electric utility
- JCP&L
Standby generator
- Manufacturer
- Generac Model # 70422
- Rated output
- 22 kW LP / 19.5 kW NG
- Fuel
- Natural Gas
- Home sized for
- 2,860 sq ft
- Electrical service
- 200 amp
- Transfer switch
- 200 amp
- Load management
- Managed Whole House
Roof
- System
- GAF Timberline Lifetime Roofing System
- Area replaced
- 3,800 sq ft
- Warranty
- 50 years
Questions from Manalapan homeowners
RoofingWhy do chimney areas leak so often?
Chimneys create multiple changes in direction and rely on step flashing, counterflashing, sealants, and masonry condition. Cracked crowns, deteriorated mortar, missing counterflashing, or incorrectly layered flashing can all create leaks that appear to be shingle failures.
Standby generatorCan the generator stay connected during a pressure test?
The machine has to be protected from test pressures beyond what its fuel controls are built to withstand. The fuel-gas code sets out when appliances are disconnected or isolated for testing, and the plumbing contractor follows both that code and the generator's installation instructions.
SolarWhat happens when the panels make more than the house is using?
The surplus flows out through the meter to the grid and creates a net-metering credit, which can offset electricity drawn from the grid at another point in the billing period or later in the annualised period.
Standby generatorWhy do outages last longer on some Manalapan streets than others?
Mature tree cover over overhead lines is the usual reason. Limbs coming down in wind, snow or ice take the lines with them, so heavily treed streets tend to see both more frequent outages and longer restoration times than open ones. It is one of the honest arguments for standby power rather than a portable generator.