{"id":67,"date":"2017-08-04T01:41:26","date_gmt":"2017-08-04T01:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2017-08-11T19:35:34","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T19:35:34","slug":"engineering-can-be-difficult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/2017\/08\/04\/engineering-can-be-difficult\/","title":{"rendered":"Unirac Engineering Saved Me Some Money!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Unirac<\/a> designed and engineered my Solar Array in a 5 x 5 grid with 72 cell horizontally arranged panels with an 8 foot height on the low edge (south side) of the array. The reason for placing the ground mount at least 8 foot off the ground was to minimize shade coming from the second story of the house. An additional benefit is that it allows access under the panels to store kayaks or other items. It also provides enough light to grow shade St. Augustine grass and maintain the yard. My roof has 11 facets making a roof mounted system inefficient.<\/p>\n

I ran into a problem with the materials required based on the engineering designs. The design called for 12 ASTM A53 2″ Galvanized Type E Grade B pipes to meet the 140mph wind load. The pipes were 21′ long and weighed over 1200lbs. This required that I try and source them locally. After ordering the pipe from a local company the pipes arrived. However, they were stamped as Grade A. Grade A pipe has a lower carbon content and I believe it does not the same heat treating. The result is a lower tensile strength and cheaper product generally imported, in my case from Vietnam. After contacting the supplier, domestic pipe needed to be ordered at a cost of more than double to meet Grade B standards. I contacted Unirac and asked them to re-engineer the system and determine if Grade A would meet the 140mph wind load requirements. A couple of days later they informed me that Grade A would handle the wind load and sent me an updated engineering document.<\/p>\n

The excavation process has begun and the Unirac ground mount system has been ordered. I expect it to take several weeks to get the parts and inspection so that I can start racking and mounting. \u00a0Below are a couple of pages from the engineering documents given to me by Unirac showing the foundation design.<\/p>\n

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Update 8\/8\/2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unirac came back with new engineering documents showing the grade A pipe as acceptable in the design. This saved me the hassle of returning the grade A pipe and also well over a thousand dollars as grade B pipe is domestic and much more expensive pipe.<\/em><\/p>\n

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  Unirac designed and engineered my Solar Array in a 5 x 5 grid with 72 cell horizontally arranged panels with an 8 foot height on the low edge (south side) of the array. The reason for placing the ground … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11,9,5,10],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ground-mount","tag-grid-tie","tag-ground-mount","tag-solar","tag-solar-array"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gridtiepower.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}