Douglas's 14.87 kW solar installation in Woodlawn, Ontario

0:00 my name is uh Douglas Patrick and I work with Canan Armed Forces I'm a recruiter with 28 Ottawa field ambulance which is

0:07 a reserve unit here in odw we've been having a lot of issues uh with power outages and uh we really like to have

0:15 some stability of our energy security going into the future dis factors would probably include the fact that there was a few grants that were being discussed

0:24 by both the federal government as well as the city of Ottawa was looking at a large scale program that's probably what

0:31 first got us interested we were looking at some way of either having battery storage or energy

0:39 generation uh generator backups that kind of thing and we thought that having some solar panels would be a nice way to

0:46 kind of complement that overall system my partner came across advertisements online and uh was impressed with some of

0:55 the features that were U being promised we like the idea that we would have fair amount of control and feedback of the

1:02 system we like the modern kind of presentation of the uh of the company but the installation itself went very very smoothly they uh they did a very

1:10 good job uh so we were happy with uh with the team that came in and did their work there is fair amount of administration that does need to be done

1:18 both between approvals safety uh standards and hydro coming in and and giving the blessing it does happen when

1:27 you're dealing with a with a larger Institution or a larger bureaucracy it's understandable that that happened we we

1:34 were being talked to by Xolar throughout the process um they did uh they did keep us informed uh throughout it currently

1:43 we're around about 70 to 75 on a good day and I think that 20 to 25 is going to come from trimming those trees it's

1:52 doing what I expected to be doing right now that if there are energy insecurity issues going into the future

2:00 uh we have something to look after ourselves and something to look after the the house with the battery backup system would give us the security of

2:09 having something during power outages which is a substantial concern where we live yeah so throughout the administrative process getting it

2:17 approved there were definitely a lot of back and forths with you know the hydro company and the safety approvals uh

2:25 because of of course they do an overview of the project and sign off on it so yeah this solar team always helped us out making sure the paperwork was

2:34 corrected and passed back along and again it was done in a reasonable amount of time so yeah we were satisfied with that so if we're turning people's rofes

2:41 into generation capacity that's I feel like less of an environmental impact power has to come from somewhere and might as well produce

2:51 it on my roof as opposed to 600 km away and put it through somebody's uh Power

2:57 Line productivity has been good we've we've certainly reduced our bill from our our our April time frame uh was was

3:07 cut I think in half uh which was good and I would anticipate over producing

3:14 over the May June July August period so that'll give us a few credits for the future months