You are my sunshine

Tuesday 1st February a little team of guys arrived to put up our solar electricity panels.  It's not a big system - standard 1.5kW - but we're hoping it will make a significant difference to the power bills.  It was something we looked at in the first house but had to cross off the list due to cost at the time.  It's still not cheap, but we came across a deal that allowed us to pay a very minimal amount up-front and then pay the rest off interest-free over the next couple of years.  We figure it makes sense to get some of the pretty much endless supply of sunshine energy that hits the earth during day-light hours and make something out of it.
It was nice to see the panels go up - 8 of them altogether - in a very pleasing kind of straight line along the back roof.  Spoils the roof-line a bit from the neighbour's place behind us (except there's no neighbour there yet) but approaching the house you can't even see them unless you're looking for them specifically, in which case you get a split-second glimpse if you're looking in the right place at the right time (and don't run off the road attempting it).
Our grand plan was to have them on and for us to greedily reap the rewards whilst not even living in the house - 2 or 3 months of electricity credits racking up in our account ready for us to move in... However, the electricity company's on to people like us and won't allow us to connect to the grid until we've moved in and moved off the 'construction' tariff onto the 'residential' tariff.  Clever people...

One of those unfortunate but unavoidable little details - the house roof works architecturally much better sloping up to the north, but the solar panels need to go the other way. They'd look a bit neater sitting flat but no bit of roof slopes the right way. I guess this way they draw a bit of attention to themselves: "Hey, look - they've got solar panels! Cool!"