As most of our clients know, our sister company ValueSolar.com provides excellent quality Mitsubishi panels at a reasonable price. They do nationwide installations and no job is too small (residential, commercial, anything solar). Right now, they are working on a 22,000 solar panel installation at some college. I’ll be sure to post some pictures on that once they’re done.

We’ve been putting off our updates mostly because we were waiting for our entire set to be installed. But unfortunately, we’re still waiting on permits for the freeway panel set from the City of Pomona.

Which brings up another point…wouldn’t city governments embrace cleaner electricity? Everybody says they are interested in cleaning up our environment but fail to act upon it. We are the first solar powered business in the City of Pomona but yet, our permits for our set of additional panels have been in for months now.

But this is not to fault the city, we understand there are many concerns involved such as safety. Yet, we only wished that more governments would give a little extra effort towards environmentally friendly endeavors. We’re not asking for any breaks, just a little expediency would be nice because the longer we wait, the more pollution we’re putting into the air. That said, we’ve worked with very nice people in the city office.

Everybody likes to see pictures so let’s have some pictures shall we? Here’s a closeup of what a panel looks like. It’s been raining for over a week now with thunderstorms and things so please excuse our clouds in the picture. We’ll try to go up and take some sunny day pictures one of these days.

We use lead free panels made by Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi leads the way in solar technology due to their high efficiency rating and lead free manufacturing process. What’s the point of using Solar if you’re dumping lead back into the environment…that’s the reason why we’re so high on these Mitsubishi panels.

We have panels spread out across our roof; mostly in cells where we can manage them. Also, we have to still leave room to maneuver around the roof. Stepping ever so slightly on a panel will break it.

Here’s some on our East wing:

And some on our West Wing (sounds like that TV Show). Sorry for the mess, our roof is littered with AC units, pipes, conduits and all kinds of things that go bump in the night.

And as we blogged before, we’re still waiting for our permits to put up panels on our south facing side. This rail is just waiting to be filled up with solar panels and runs the length of our building and then some. We can’t wait to put up a Freeway cam powered on Solar Energy…I think it would the first of its kind. We get excellent views of the 10 freeway (east and west), and the 57 / 210 / 10 freeway interchange.

That’s it for now, in our next installment, we’ll have more details on our SolarCam (we hope). And if you work in the City of Pomona government office, please go hit up the building inspector and ask him to approve our freeway solar panel permits, pretty please with sugar on top

A week ago, we hooked the solar-powered batteries back up to our main power line. There was a slight amount of down-time as we had to disconnect our power sources to ensure a safe transition.

Well after about 2 hours of grueling manual labor, we have delivered several tons of solar panels and racks onto our rooftop. Quite literally, we had a chain of hands going from the ground level up onto the roof. For guys accustomed to a nice cool office environment, working outside in the midday heat was indeed a “challenge”.

Well, what’s left now? There’s still a few boxes that need to go up to the roof but we’ll let the installers take care of that stuff. We’ve done about as much as we could. We’re trying to get them to come install it this weekend, but have not gotten a commitment from them yet. Worst case, they should be able to get up there next weekend to do the final installation.

We at Iron Mountain Hosting cannot wait to get them back up there on the roof. They’re a true sight to behold in the midday sun. Towers of power glistening in the sunlight, delivering pure, natural energy to our racks and servers.

We’ll post another update once the panels are back in place, until then we’ll get our cameras ready.

Photovoltaic Cells convert sunlight into energy (photo=light, voltaic=electricity) by forcing energy from the sun into several layers of conductive material.

Iron Mountain Hosting uses photovoltaic cells made by Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi is a world leader in solar cells and has been researching them since 1974.

Although we often think of solar cells as part of tiny calculators, lets not forget that many of the man-made satellites orbiting earth are powered on Solar Cells created in Mitsubishi labs.

…to be continued in the next article Part II.

Iron Mountain Hosting was the 2nd hosting company to adopt solar power back in April 2007.

We thought we were the first ones to adopt solar power for webhosting but it turns out that www.AISO.net beat us to the punch by over a year. They were the first ones to do so and we gladly tip our green hats off to them.

We highly recommend them as a Windows and Linux webhosting company that is responsible to our environment.

Any company that takes an active stance in preserving our environment while maintaining profitability and good business ethics gains our respect and admiration.

We recently took our solar panels down from our building to do some retrofitting. Why would we take down some perfectly working solar panels?

Well, the answer comes in many parts:

• We wanted to get better visibility for the panels
• Many people still think a solar cell is only good for a pocket calculator
• People kept trying to climb our roof to have a look at our solar array
• We wanted to promote more public awareness to the viability of solar panels as an alternative energy source.
• They look cool
• Gives us a reason to setup a Solar FreewayCam

Really, any of these are good reasons but the most important one really had to be that we had too much free time on our hands.

Thanks to the kind gents at Valuesolar.com, we had a quick turn-around time for the retrofitting and new racks. As soon as our new setup gets approved, we’ll be rigging these panels back up again.

So as stated in the topic, we’ve gotten the bad boys back and we’ll start blogging about the installation.

The red dot should give you an idea of where they will now be placed. This picture is taken from the west wing of our building. We’ll be stringing them along our South facing side.