It’s been a bit less than 2 weeks since we’ve had our solar panels installed, and yesterday the OK was given to flip the power switch to start the system.I had kind of expected a few people to show up, namely some people (or even one) from the electric company and also some people from the shop where we bought our solar panels (EDION Tokushima), but it turned out to be only one of the staff from EDION. Turning on the solar system was literally just flipping the switch in the fuse box outside of our house. Since the box is at eye level and doesn’t require a ladder to access, it seemed a task that I could have done. No matter, the switch was flipped and away we went. Well, not quite.Once the power started, the panel in our house had to be set up. This required a couple of phone calls to get the information needed. The EDION staff was very helpful and courteous throughout (they’ve been great through all of this). Finally, the system started and we could see information similar to that in the picture. Because this happened after 4 PM, by the time everything was set up we only were able to produce about 10 minutes of energy from the solar panels.Today was the first full day to use the solar system. The button at the bottom in the centre with the picture of the house is called, appropriately enough, ホーム or in English, Home. The blue colour around the button indicates that we are producing more energy than we are using, so we are selling energy to the Utility company. When we buy energy, the button becomes yellowish-orange.At 8:39 AM the left side of the panel shows that our solar panels are currently producing 2.00 kW of energy.The centre picture shows that currently our house is using 0.52 kW of energy.And on the right side, we can see that a grand total of 1.48 kW of energy is being sold to the Utility company.There is much more data to be found by pressing various buttons, but this simple home screen makes it easy to tell what’s happening with our energy usage.Our grand scheme is not to make money from the solar panels, but instead to help pay for the electricity we consume.If more and more energy can be produced via solar and other safe means, hopefully the nuclear plants will be used less and less in Japan.We begin this journey with solar power today (well, actually we started yesterday) and this will hopefully be long and fruitful. We’ll keep you posted along the way.