photon magazine

i was debating whether to give some comments on this magazine or not here on the forum and decided just to throw it out to everybody anyway as a possible observation. what i have to say is based on 1 trial issue (nov 2009) that was sent to me as a lure to subscribe. in general it seems like a nice mag with an article even on the newer solyndra pvs, but what bothers me was some of the content was not scrutinized or elaborated on well enough. if you've got the magazine look to see what i'm talking about as i could've misread or overlooked something.

on page 90 there's a guy from california who wanted backup power to keep his fish in his 3000 gallon fish tank cooled from excessive heat that would kill the fish in an outage. yes, that's a tall order. what they settled on was a 14kw pv system with 70 sanyo 200w modules as he wanted an offgrid capable system that would offset costs of electric use. it went on saying of the usual difficulties one may encounter with compliance to the better half's wants as well as the local government on nec rules. one of the problems was nec compliance using enphase microinverters and the sanyo modules needing fuse protection. i don't know if i'd have gone with a system using that many microinverters and we have had other threads about this subject so i won't get into it here, but should they not have said more on this as to why the ruling out of larger gt inverters?
now this won't jump right out for some here, but his requirement of backup power will not be met with using any straight gt system. sure one of his goals of offsetting electric costs will be met, but as soon as the power goes down those fish are as good as dead as the anti-islanding feature of the inverters will kick in leaving him with no power. no batteries are present and neither is an offgrid inverter. the article does make mention of a future purchase of an sma sunny island to simulate the grid for when the grid goes down. this could work in backfeeding, but still no mention of batteries are made as this will need a 48v 100ah minimum battery bank to make it work and little is said about the ins and outs involved in order to do this. maybe i'm making too much of this one, but i feel more should've been said on the matter and less on his wife's opinions of asthetics.
of note is that they have pv strings facing many different directions. hard to tell if not good angles and directions from the pic. this would make it advisable to use dedicated larger gt inverters for strings of differing directions.

they list on page 96 some module testing. i won't copy things for you guys to see as it may violate their copy rights, but they test old outdated pvs as well as new which is dumb to test something that is now no longer in production. aside from that possibly for comparison's sake i am confused how they listed lower wattage pvs as outputting close to their winners with higher wattages. they showed a discontinued evergreen ec-120 as 6th place at 1027kwh with the winner as a solarworld sw 210 at 1063kwh. the kwh output (not sure of how long, but set to stc standards) is similar between different wattages and pv types. am i overlooking something or not as i don't think the kwh ratings should be quite that close?

my last one is only a comment on the small $3.1 billion set aside by the doe shown on page 42 for state energy programs and is nothing about the mag itself. with that much money one could install 124,000 $25,000 systems or 155,000 systems at a cost of $20,000 each outright. remember they only pay a portion of system costs and i seriously doubt they are subsidizing that many systems every year. hope i'm wrong on that, but i think they may be placing too much into bureaucracy costs. in any case this is only a fraction of the total doe office of energy efficiency and renewable energy monies as it represents 18.45% of the total $16.8 billion budget. and remember this is not for offgrid either. with so much $ floating around you might think more households are insulated and solar installed than actually are. remember they do this every year so i would think there would be more solar homes than there are. i think it's the equivalent kind of thinking as to traveling 23000 miles east to go 1000 miles west. this is as far as i want to comment on our governing body, but remember i could be wrong.

my opinion is that it's not bad with some interesting articles, but is no home power magazine.