Beam me up, Scotty

Wouldn't that be nice?! After another busy weekend, I would have loved to have someone to "beam me up" to the roof of the house, allowing me to finish wiring up the solar modules. First off, let me say this, "Kids, do not attempt this at home." This work is certainly not for the faint-of-heart. I am working on a 12/12 pitch roof. That means the roof is angled 45* off of vertical (or flat, for that matter). The roof sits above our large wrap around deck and that itself, sits almost 10 feet off the ground. If you slip and fall off, it's a long way down! Note to self: "Do NOT slip off the roof!"
In order to get enough angle on the ladder to make it safe, I positioned it on the ground next to the house. I dug shallow depressions for the ladder to sit in so it cannot slip, lashed the bottom of the ladder to one of the concrete deck footings, and finally, tied off the top of the ladder to one of the mounting bracket legs on the solar array .I was/am able to work safely, albeit a little slowly as I move the big ladder around.
Carol's daughter, Jessica, is visiting us so on Saturday we took the opportunity to go golfing with her and her brother, Alex. Tobiano Golf Club has a special deal for Kamloops residents so we decided to give that course a try. If I could use one word to describe our day there, it would have to be "spectacular!"
It is the nicest course I have ever played. The scenery (it sits on hills set beside and above Kamloops Lake) and the amazing natural terrain, along with the efforts of the course workers and management, make it a challenging and beautiful golf course. I won't go into the details of my score. Suffice it to say that Alex played the best of our threesome! It was a fantastic day and will live as a fond memory for many years.
So that took Saturday off the table as far as working at the house was concerned. Sunday morning however, saw us heading up to the new place. It was a stunner of a day, hitting 27*C at the house, and 34*C down in the valley. In the E-Panel, I put the final crimp connector on the cable from the solar modules and connected it up to the input breaker. I spent a couple of hours drilling and installing the grounding clips on each module in the array, and then ran the copper grounding wire through each clip and into the combiner box beside the array. The last thing to do was to actually connect the modules to the system. Two panels connect in series and then the four sets of two are wired into the combiner box. Each pair is wired to its own breaker and the negative busbar and then the load side of those breakers connect to the cable that feeds down through the conduit to the Midnite Solar E-Panel. You must be careful that you wire everything with the correct polarity, positive to positive, etc. as it is easy to damage the modules if wired incorrectly. This meant lots of volt meter work, checking and rechecking before switching on the appropriate breakers in the combiner box and the E-Panel. Anyway, I wired up two pairs of modules, flipped the breakers and ... it works! Yay! I still have two pairs to hook up later this week, but at least now the batteries are receiving a charge.
It might not be getting the "warp core" online but it is "one small step for man....". I will try and make Scotty proud.