Project notes
About the project
This Weston home holds a quiet but important distinction: it was the first solar project Sprightful ever installed in South Florida. Because this was a close family project, every design decision, every trip back to tune the system, every phase of expansion happened with the kind of unhurried, multi-decade horizon most solar companies never get to plan against.
Phase one kicked off in July 2016 and was energized by early September 2016 — about eight weeks, contract to meter flip. An 8.6 kW rooftop array sized to cover the household baseline load, mounted on standoffs bolted directly into the roof trusses with stainless-steel hardware — the South-Florida-grade approach, not the tile-hook clamps common in lower-wind regions — and paired with a SolarEdge string inverter plus per-module DC optimizers. It was state-of-the-art at the time, and it produced reliably for four years before the household's electrical appetite outgrew it — a second EV, a pool pump that ran longer in the summer, and a few more window-unit upgrades to central HVAC. In 2020 we came back and added 3.8 kW of rooftop PV using Enphase microinverters, bringing the total nameplate to 12.4 kW. The two subsystems ran side by side for four more years.
By 2024 the tile roof's underlayment — original to the home, already a decade older than the panels — was at the end of its service life. Rather than patch around the PV, we treated the re-roof as an opportunity to simplify the entire electrical stack. We pulled all 44 panels, the SolarEdge inverter, and the Enphase microinverters; coordinated the roofing crew to refresh the underlayment and reset the barrel tile; and then reinstalled the full 12.4 kW array on the fresh roof — this time routed directly into a single Tesla Powerwall 3. Because the Powerwall 3 ships with an integrated 11.5 kW solar inverter, the whole 12.4 kW array now runs through one DC-coupled device instead of two independent inverter platforms. Fewer points of failure, one monitoring app, better round-trip efficiency into the battery, and — for the first time in eight years — battery backup during hurricane-season outages.
The system has been running wonderfully since December 2024. My parents have watched the Powerwall ride the family through several FPL blinks and one multi-hour outage without so much as a flicker on the lights or the WiFi. It's the closest thing to a proof point we have that Sprightful's approach holds up over the long haul — not just the install, but the decade that follows it.