I came home from rowing Saturday and attempted to hire a Genie Lift, having left it too late to book one on Friday.
The one I hired previously for attaching my projector to the ceiling was a GL10 that I had hired from HSS ‘Lift and Shift’ in Hayes, except that the hire price was now £217.00 for a single day’s hire!
The one I was looking to hire was a Genie SLA10 and would cost me around £79.00 a day from a more local hire firm in Harrow.
After visiting them and determining that it would not it in the back of my car (unlike the GL10), I arranged to have it delivered on Tuesday as my son did not have college that day.
Tuesday morning and the Genie lift arrived at about 08:10, right when I was in the middle of my 10,000m SkiErg time trial, so I had to have my wife go and sign for it as I was not about to stop.
Around lunch time, I finally had a gap in my various meetings, so went out to set up the Genie lift and start moving some of the ballast slabs.
I had taken them off their pallet on the weekend and stacked them in front of the Cinema room so that I could finally charge my car again.
I used one of the pallets that came with the various solar deliveries as a platform and lifted the slabs in two groups, 30 the first time and then 16 on the second.
This lift is supposed to be capable if lifting 464Kg with an 18 to 24″ load centre, although how you would manage to winch that up I have no idea.
Lifting the 30 x 9Kg tiles and the pallet was probably around 300Kg and it took my son on one handle and me on the other to winch it up, I hate to think what it would be like with another 150Kg on it.
The slabs were then stacked on the roof ready for use when I start laying out the solar panels.
In order to make the batteries as light as possible, I decided to remove all of the micro inverters from each battery.
It is advised to drill the holes for conduit/stuffing glands before mounting on the wall, so I did this next.
These are 32mm holes for M32 IP68 stuffing glands, I will be using 20mm rigid PVC conduit between the batteries and the solar sub panel.
The left most battery only has a gland installed on the right side, the other two have glands installed both sides (there will ultimately be a fourth battery which will only have a gland on the left side).
I had also purchased the Enphase lifting handles to make the job of carrying the batteries and lifting them onto their mounts easier.
These were not cheap, but the job would have been much more difficult without them.
I made use of the base part of the battery box as protection against the pallet and Genie lift, this also meant that I could drag it off the pallet and partially onto the roof before attempting to lift it up.
The pallet is offset on the forks so that the bulk of the weight of the battery sits between them and I can have the Genie lift closer to the wall.
I put the middle one up first, then the left one and finally the right one
Next job was to re-install the micro inverters that had all been stacked on my lounge floor along with the covers.
It was easier to just take them all up in one go with the Genie lift than take them up 3 at a time on the ladder.
Having screwed them all back in place, I set about installing the ‘seizmic’ screws, top clips, conduit covers and finally installed the covers and screwed these in place as well.
All secured and weather safe ready for me to do some wiring on the weekend.