After a grueling and agonizing process with the City, we've finally got the complete set of approvals of our building plans and the necessary permits. I'm really not impressed with how the City seems to have no regard for who is paying the bills for all these delays. The person who was supposed to sign off on the plans went on vacation without telling us or leaving someone else to push the paper. We had to resort to chasing it through the system.
Anyhow, here we are at last ready to put the pedal to the metal. A day after our permits were granted, here is the arrival of the Beast Part 2 ripping down the last of the house. It was so fast that my contractor barely had time to call me and let me know it was happening. All told, 10 minutes and the whole thing was knocked down and being ground up by the giant metal treads of the CAT.
What was frustrating again was that the inspector had to show up before the demolition could proceed and he gave a window of 9-noon. Of course, the demolition folks showed up at 8:30am ready to go, but had to sit around until noon when the inspector finally showed up. He gave his blessings and they went at it with a vengeance.
In the mean time, the back foundation has been finalized and will be poured on Thursday. The work on the front foundation will start next week.
We also placed our order for our solar system. They filed our R1 permit for the CA rebate and our panels are on order to lock in pricing. We wanted to get the R1 in asap as we heard rumours that CA was going to reduce the rebate rates. We were never able to get any concrete information on this, despite a lot of e-mails and calls to the rebate center which were never returned.
There is also a little flux right now on re-upping the ceiling cap on the number of households PG&E is required to buy back power from on the net metering basis. They will be hitting that ceiling soon this year after which they have no obligation to buy back any more power from new applicants, but there is legislation working its way through CA government to extend the ceiling. It would be darn silly to cap this and thereby ruin the payback economics on a solar investment.
