Ground rod finally in — much easier than I expected

I put mine in a couple summers back and my soil was the complete opposite of yours. Heavy clay with a gravel pocket right where the rod needed to go, and every hammer-only attempt just bent the rod. What saved me was the water trick. I ran a garden hose into the hole while pushing the rod down with a scrap of rebar, jetting the clay loose as I went. Slower than your twenty minutes but the plating came thru undamaged and I never had to fight a rock. One thing I'd flag for anyone planning this is the two-rod situation. My area wanted two electrodes spaced apart unless you can show the first one reads low enugh on its own, so I ended up driving a second one near the inverter and tying the runs togather underground. Check before you call it done because redoing a rod is no fun. After the fact I walked around with a multimeter and confirmed the frames actually read continuous back to the rod. Turned out one rail on my array wasn't making contact through a joint and I had to add a jumper across it. Testing after installation is a step I would not skip again.

For my setup I ended up with two rods instead of one. When the electrician came out to sign off on our solar hookup he looked at the single rod the house had used since the 90s and said he wanted a second one before he'd close the permit. We drove the new one about ten feet from the original and tied them together with bare copper, then everything bonds back at the main panel. Two trips with the hammer drill instead of one but the inspection went clean the same week. The spacing thing surprised me, I figured closer was better, but he explained it like spreading the resistance out over more soil. Our ground here is rocky glacial stuff so the second rod also gave a backup path in case one of them sits in a bad pocket. On the bonding side, what I actually spent more time on than the rods was making sure the panel frames and rails had a continuous path back. The rack came with little bonding clips for between the modules and I had skipped two of them the first go around because they looked decorative. They are not decorative. Your pilot hole method sounds way nicer than what I dealt with. My first rod hit a rock about two feet down and came back up looking like a banana.

Reading this as someone who hasn't done mine yet and it's a bit reassuring. My situation is diffrent because I'm in a rental-adjacent setup, well, my parents' place actually, and thier garage slab is where the array is going. I keep wondering wether I can even drive a rod near there since the whole yard is old fill dirt from when they built the house. Is there any way to tell what's under there without digging half of it up, or do I just start and see what happens? I've got one of those cheap ground resistance testers on my wishlist but no idea if that's overkill for a small setup like this.

Curious beginner here, this whole rod thing is new to me. My panels are going up next month and I honestly thought the wires just handled that stuff on their own. So the frames and rails get their own wire that runs down to the metal stick in the ground? Does that wire have to be one solid piece the whole way, or can it have connectors like everything else in my setup?