I have spent an embarrassing amount of time learning about solar for someone who doesn’t actually have any solar. I can tell you about MC4 connectors, micro-inverters, string sizing, PV wire, conductor derating, batteries, grounding, permits, and why a CSA-approved Class T fuse block somehow costs $500 when something that looks like it does the same job costs $40 on Amazon.
And I still want solar. That’s the annoying part.
If I had decided solar was stupid or the economics didn’t work, this would be easy. I’d move on to some other expensive hobby. Instead, I keep coming back to it.
The more I’ve learned, though, the more convinced I’ve become that I don’t have a good place for the amount of solar that would actually interest me. Apparently knowing that isn’t enough to stop me from looking at solar equipment.
It Started on Facebook Marketplace
I was browsing Facebook Marketplace when I came across a guy named Gerry selling 440-watt solar panels for $170 each.
And Gerry would deliver them for free.
Five panels. 2.2 kW of solar for $850. How could I go wrong?
Gerry showed up, and we unloaded them, leaning all five against my shed. After he left, I stood there looking at them for a while.
I’d seen pictures of solar panels on the Internet. I saw the dimensions on the spec sheets. None of this should have been a surprise. But somehow, photos and dimensions on a web page and five 440-watt panels leaning against your shed are not the same thing.
They were huge.
Until then, a panel had been 440 watts. A voltage. An output current.
Now, I had five enormous sheets of glass leaning against my shed.
I knew the roof of my half-duplex wasn’t an option, but I’d seen plenty of pictures and videos of ground mounts. Put the panels on a rack in the backyard. How hard could that be?
It was a lot easier to think that before I had five of them leaning against the shed. Now, I was trying to picture that much glass permanently occupying part of my backyard.
And it was a lot of backyard. Five panels in a row would be around 20 feet wide and, depending on the angle, maybe five or six feet deep and five or six feet high at the back. This would not be a little rack tucked beside the fence. It was going to be a 20-foot-long structure sitting in my yard.
I looked at the panels, looked at the yard and eventually called Gerry and asked if he’d take them back.
That was embarrassing.
There was nothing wrong with the panels and nothing wrong with the deal. The problem was me. I’d figured out how to buy five solar panels before I’d figured out what the hell I was going to do with them.
I was in over my head, so I stopped.
Gerry came back and took the panels away. I lost a few hundred dollars on the exercise. You’d think by my age I’d occasionally figure these things out before buying them.
Apparently not.
I didn’t stop thinking about solar, though. Seeing those panels made me realize that before I tried this again, I needed to figure out what the project would actually look like.
Think Plywood, Not Doors
People sometimes describe modern solar panels as being about the size of a door. I’ve never found that particularly useful.
Think about a 4-by-8 sheet of plywood.
Most people know exactly what that means. They have seen plywood. They’ve probably carried it. They understand how much space a sheet occupies, how awkward it can be, and what occurs when the wind catches it.
Now make the plywood heavier, mostly out of glass, worth a couple hundred dollars and something you really don’t want falling face-first onto your concrete patio.
That’s a modern large solar panel.
More importantly, think about multiples. “Five solar panels” doesn’t sound large. “Five sheets of 4-by-8 plywood” does.
And if you’re thinking about a 10- or 12-kW residential array using today’s large panels, think of 20 sheets of plywood.
Suddenly, “we’ll put some solar on the roof” looks a little different.
Temporary and Movable = No Permit
After Gerry took the panels back, I went back to reading and watching videos. A lot of what I found was American DIY solar content, and somewhere along the way, I picked up what seemed like a pretty useful answer:
If you make the ground mount temporary and movable, no permit.
The idea was pretty simple. Don’t pour footings or permanently attach the thing to anything. Put the panels on a rack, hold it down with concrete blocks and keep the whole thing movable.
That sounded doable.
So this time, I started figuring out the ground mount before buying the panels.
One system I priced was IntegraRack. Five panels in one row would need six aluminum frames. At around $320 each in Canada, that came to about $1,900.
My five panels cost $850. I was now looking at roughly $2,000 worth of aluminum to hold up $850 worth of solar panels.
I can already hear someone saying, “Only an idiot would spend two grand on that. Go to Home Depot, buy some pressure-treated 4×4s, order rails and clamps from Amazon and build the damn thing.”
Fair enough. I’m pretty sure I could build something for a lot less than $2,000. Pressure-treated lumber isn’t exactly exotic technology.
Except now I’m designing the ground mount. And I am no handyman.
How big do the posts need to be? What is the distance between them? How am I anchoring them? What happens when an Alberta wind gets underneath five big solar panels? What about snow?
None of those questions are impossible, but now they’re my questions. And if the answer involves digging holes, setting posts and pouring concrete, I’ve also ruined my clever idea that the whole thing is temporary and movable.
So ballast still looked attractive.
IntegraRack’s published EarthBallast guidance calls for about 1,000 pounds per panel. For five panels, that’s roughly 5,000 pounds.
My first reaction was that 1,000 pounds per panel sounded ridiculous.
Then I looked at another ground-mount system from Solar Goose. The detail I was looking at called for something like a 2-foot by 2-foot by 2-foot concrete footing under each support.
That’s eight cubic feet of concrete. At roughly 120 pounds per cubic foot, that’s getting pretty close to 1,000 pounds of concrete per support.
Okay. Maybe the IntegraRack number wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
They’re different systems, but they were both telling me basically the same thing: it takes a lot of ballast to keep five big solar panels where you put them when the wind picks up.
The big concrete footings weren’t much help with my temporary-and-movable idea, so I went looking for ballast I could actually move.
Home Depot had 24-inch square, 2-inch-thick concrete patio blocks weighing around 80 pounds each. To get somewhere near 5,000 pounds, I’d need sixty-some of them.
Now, I could picture it.
Either the Home Depot truck drops a small mountain of concrete in my driveway and I carry it into the backyard one 80-pound block at a time, or I put ten at a time in the SUV and make six or seven trips.
At around $16 each, that’s another $1,000 in concrete. I’d still need something sensible for the blocks to sit on, the 1-inch conduit tying the rack frames together, hardware and all the other stuff I’d stopped bothering to add up.
Could someone work out my exact installation and determine a different ballast requirement? Of course. I’m trying to get a feel for the size of this, not produce an exact bill of materials.
I started with $850 worth of bargain solar panels. Now, I was looking at about $2,000 in aluminum racking and a $1,000 pile of patio blocks, and I still hadn’t bought an inverter or connected a wire.
Are you kidding me?
And Then the Electricity Has to Get Back to the House
Fine. Suppose I solve all of that. I’ve got the panels, the ground mount and several thousand pounds of something preventing it from flying over the fence and landing on my neighbour’s car.
I still have one fairly obvious problem.
The electricity has to get back to the house somehow.
The place I could realistically put the ground mount was about 50 feet from the house, with my yard and a concrete patio in between. This was where my nice clean idea of temporary and movable means no permit started falling apart.
The panels could be temporary. The rack could be temporary. I could put the damn thing on wheels if I wanted and pretend I didn’t need a development permit. But the wires still had to enter the house.
Once the wires entered the house, I was into electrical code. Calling the panels temporary didn’t change that.
So now, I’m back to conduit, trenching, wire, grounding, boxes, fittings, permits and inspections. The plastic pipe itself isn’t particularly expensive. Getting it from the panels to the house is.
One Alberta contractor puts trenching for electrical conduit at roughly $45 to $90 per metre for excavation alone, before conduit, wire, electrical work or fixing whatever got dug up.
I don’t know exactly what my 50-foot run would cost, and I will not pretend I had somebody quote the job. But a few thousand dollars seems to be in the right ballpark.
Getting the electricity back to the house could easily cost as much as the panels, racks and pile of concrete I’d already priced.
At that point, the original five $170 solar panels are almost a rounding error.
This is also where I understand the homeowner who starts thinking, Surely I don’t need to spend that much to accomplish this.
I can imagine putting suitable wire in flexible plastic conduit, neatly fastening it along the fence and having it work perfectly well for years. Maybe decades. If the fence gets damaged, fix it. Conduit damaged? Fix it. If something stops working, figure out what broke.
That’s how I deal with plenty of other things around the house.
The electrical code assumes neither that I will own the house indefinitely nor that I will notice every problem and fix it on Saturday morning. I understand that too.
That’s the problem.
I don’t think most unpermitted DIY solar starts with somebody deciding that safety rules are stupid. I suspect it more often starts with somebody solving one problem, discovering that the next one costs thousands of dollars and thinking, There has to be a cheaper and easier way.
I understand that person a lot better now.
My Heart Wants Solar. My Head Keeps Doing Site Surveys.
This probably sounds like I’ve talked myself out of solar.
I haven’t. That’s the problem.
I still read about it, look at equipment and spend far too much time reading about connectors, micro-inverters, batteries, racking and electrical code. You’d think Gerry’s panels would have cured me.
Apparently not.
What those “cheap” panels did was make solar real in a way that spec sheets and YouTube videos never had.
Before Gerry arrived, I thought I was buying watts. Then he leaned five panels against my shed and drove away.
Suddenly, those watts had a physical presence I hadn’t grasped before.
They took up a lot of space, caught wind and needed somewhere to live. That somewhere needed a structure, the structure needed to stay where I put it, and the electricity needed a way back to the house.
So I called Gerry and asked him to take the panels back.
There was nothing wrong with them. There was nothing wrong with the deal. They really were cheap at $170 each.
I’d simply bought the panels before asking the obvious question: where the hell am I going to put them?
After Gerry took them away, I didn’t decide to forget solar. I figured out what I’d actually be getting into before trying again.
I’m still figuring it out.
I plan to move in 2027. Maybe my next house has a great south-facing roof, a detached shop with the electrical service in exactly the right place, or enough land that a ground mount doesn’t take over the yard. Great.
But I’m not buying my next house based on its solar potential.
So that’s where I’ve ended up.
My heart wants solar. My head keeps doing site surveys. And so far, my head keeps winning.
Note: I’m not an electrician, engineer or solar installer. I’m writing about what I’ve learned while trying to understand residential solar in Canada. This isn’t electrical, engineering or code advice. Requirements vary by installation and jurisdiction, so check with your local authority having jurisdiction and qualified professionals before doing electrical or structural work.