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[Paul Jones]

We will be taking the solar plunge this year. We live on 1.5 acres where 0.5 acres is flat and then the backyard remaining 1 acre slopes 40 degrees down into a box canyon. It has the perfect southern exposure and my next door neighbor who has 4 acres with 0.5 flat put an 84 panel solar installation on their upper slope. We didn't even notice it for a week until I was looking over the edge of our property and I spotted his solar array. The neighbor said the overall installation was far less expensive than a roof installation because he can use much lower efficiency solar panels (but more of these) because he had no size restrictions as compared to trying to cram as many solar panels on the roof.

The photo on the left shows the neighbor's solar array as seen from the slope on our property. My chipper is in the foreground and I had just finished removing some re-growth of vegetation that if allowed to grow large will eventually die and become tumble weeds. Great material for wildfires as you can see in the 2008 photo on the right. There were three or four homes up the far ridge line in the background that totally burned down to nothing but white ash and a brick fireplaces due to the 40 to 50 MPH sustained winds. The city lost about 140 homes and many others damaged including our house. Also for the next wildfire (just a matter of when) I am putting all the patio furniture into the pool. The falling burning embers put holes in all the seat covers and webbing.





We have a neighbor that flies drones and takes videos of our surrounding neighborhoods. I started watching some of his YouTube videos and realized that a lot of my neighbors already had solar installations on their slopes. You just can't see them in the box canyons (we are at 750 elevation above sea level but the neighbors farther up the hill in the other direction are at 1,400' and very secluded in the box canyons). I do a LOT of brush clearing all the time and will have to make sure we have good brush clearance for the solar array (I have three chain saws and a 10HP chipper that consumes 3" dia. branches like butter). We had an awful wildfire in November 2008 that burned down many of the neighbors' homes including the next door neighbor on the other side. Just about everything has been rebuilt, far more fireproof and of course twice as large as to what was there before (hence the need for solar).

I love to hear more about your alternative energy adventures. By the way, we have plenty of on-shore breezes for wind generation but not sure about the city code restrictions.

We finally installed a 14.6 kW solar panel array on our lower slope of the property on 12-20-16 and avoided installing this on the roof. The ground installation allowed the optimum position and size of the array (plus it could be expanded if required).