Rooftop solar gets our meter spinning backward in Littleton, Colorado

Vincent of Sopris Solar secures solar panels together on the south roof of the Highline Crossing Cohousing Community Common House in Littleton, Colo. [Photo by Christof Demont-Heinrich].
editor's blog iconA couple of weeks ago, Sopris Solar completed the installation of a two-array 19.6 kW solar system on the roof of one of our garage block units and our HOA Community House here in Highline Crossing Cohousing Community in Littleton, Colo.

The system hasn’t officially gone online yet with Xcel Energy, our utility. We are likely at least two weeks away from that still. However, today, we had a production monitoring system set up by Sopris so that we can monitor the production of our sixty-three 310-watt Mission Solar panels paired with APsystems micro-inverters.

As part of that set up, Sopris had to turn on the two solar arrays so that we could make sure the panels — and the solar power production system — were working.

They are!

And we got to see our electric meters spin backwards as a result, meaning we watched as our solar arrays produced more electricity than was being drawn in our Community House and in our garage units.

I’ve only seen this happen once before, 10 years ago, when my now ex-wife and I had a 5.5 kW home solar system installed at 4000 S. Atchison Way in Aurora, Colo. by REC Solar. I got to see the old dial/analog meter spin backward there as well. It was very cool.

Ten years later, it STILL is very cool to see an electricity meter spin backward — and, yes, 10 years later, apparently I am still a geek, a TOTAL solar energy geek, to be sure!

Hope you enjoy watching our utility meter spin backward above! It is SOOO cool!


Some day, hopefully sooner rather than later, we will have a 100% renewable energy system on a global basis where there is a TON of backward spinning and that electricity is being stored in battery packs, in hydroelectric pumped storage and other forms of electricity storage.

That will be a truly wonderful day — and I hope I live to see it!

I’m 53, just in case you’re wondering, and or want to do the “projection” math 😉

 ==> Below is the video from TEN YEARS AGO that I shot after I helped “populate” the world with 5.59 kW of solar at our Aurora, Colo. home back then. I am now directly responsible for “populating” the world with 25 kW of more solar, and, I hope, indirectly responsible for populating the world with many more times that amount via people reading SolarChargedDriving.Com 🙂