The building department offered a free charge!
I spent the early part of the day putting together my permit documents and engineering plans from RenVu, Unirac, SunnyBoy (SMA) and SunEdision this morning and visited the Building Department in the afternoon.
After a little hiccup with zoning I was able to get to the permit department. I had printed the permitting document in color and bound it nicely. The first employee in the zoning office gave me the go ahead to permitting but required that I get two copies. I ran across the block to Fed Ex and had another copy printed and bound. The time and money I spent binding and formatting the document was mostly a waste as they scan everything in. I’m not sure why they needed two copies if they were going to scan it. When I came back the new zoning employee indicated that I needed a survey with the property lines. I had it in the document but the property lines had been erased. He also wrote in the permit request that I would need a fence to hide the array. I did not want to commit to a fence at this point as it would make it difficult to get my array at less than $1.00 per kilowatt. After 10 minutes of trying to explain that the fence would not hide the array as it was 8-12 feet in the air and the fence was only 6 feet high, he scratched the requirement off of the document.
The permitting office had no problem. They simply told me that had not seen an install ground mounted and definitely not one installed so high off the ground. He sent me to the cashier and $460.88 later, I’m officially a permit holder.
I filed my Notice-of-Commencement form the following Monday, July 24th, and I’m ready to begin the work. I will include video of the complete install. It will take me some time to get started. I have to remove a shed and it contents, chicken coop, a recently dead Canary Island Date Palm and a trailer loaded with junk.
