What are YOUR solar PV's generating TODAY?

Ambient Fish

Hi Steve, total cost was £10,400, I wish I had spent it 5 years ago. Money was sitting in an ISA earning 0.75% and when I looked at the conservative rate of return on solar it was a no brainer to me. I could have bought a decent used car or a new kitchen and bathroom but none of these would save me cash on my fuel bills and a small income from FIT. So far my electricity bills will be dropping by approximately 2 thirds, as I said above no point in investing in this kit if you don't change your lifestyle, with 2 hours sunshine a day I am off grid all day and pulling well under 2 kwh from the grid mostly made up by the small draw required for the inverter, Bear in mind that the system has only been running for 1 month in winter so summer figures will be better as the inverter does not draw from the grid when it is exporting to the grid.

Barcoing Mad

Today, it is generating nothing. Zero. Nada. Sweet FA.

I'm looking at the swaying branches, and wondering how a 5m diameter wind turbine would go down with the neighbours. (Rhetorical question. I live in a garden village surrounded by folks who don't believe in global warming, because the Earth is flat.)

bardel

Hi all,

Just read this thread last night to catch up!  Reason being my solar PV is being installed currently.

We have a 25kW ground mount array being installed, south facing in full view of the sun all day (not that there is any around at the moment).  We were hoping to install earlier in the year, but took a while to sort planning permission etc.

                                                                                 

Panels are JA Solar 300w and we have 88 of them! .  Inverter is SMA.  Looking forward to seeing some numbers coming through soon.

We are on 3 phase supply here as we consume a lot of energy, circa 80kWh a day.  We changed out heating to ground source heat pump last winter which triggered the requirement for the 3 phase supply upgrade as the pump is 15kW.

In the last year, since we installed the 3 phase, we have consumed 30,000 kWh of energy.  I've recently been monitoring my house consumption to try and identify culprits (both equipment and people) and our idle is around 1.75kW when everything is shut down and I'm tucked up in bed.  Currently the house is running off one of the phases of the three phase supply, but I need to look at splitting this across the phases to get the most out of the generation as we will be generating across all 3 phases.  

We will be looking to add batteries in the future, but it seems at the current cost, the ROI is around 10 years which is roughly their expected life span, so not beneficial it would seem.  Plan is to monitor consumption and generation between now and late summer and then use this information to try and determine best course of action for batteries and when they will become economically viable.

I've been using eMonCMS with eMonTX and EmonBase open hardware to monitor my usage currently.  Not sure if any of you have looked into this, but it's pretty groovy stuff if your into this kind of thing.  The graph below shows our usage across the 4 consumer units we have on the house / garage.  This is without the heat pump as that isn't monitored currently.  I've just ordered another 2 x emonTX devices to monitor the total 3 phase supply and the 3 phase generation.

                                                                       

bardel

4.4kWh generated today.  Obviously a very bleak and rainy day and not too long until the shortest day of the year so I’m guessing this is going to be close to my poorest daily generation?  Time will tell.  Not much capacity there for the winter months despite the size of the array.

Kitch

Thats a good production, where are you based?
My 14kW (49 285w panels) produced 2kWh, overcast all day (based near sheffield).

In comparison last Tuesday they produced 285Wh, it was raining and very overcast dark.

bardel

Hi Kitch,

We’re mid Essex.  So given the ratio of install size between yours and mine, looks to be performing the same which is good news.  

285Wh on a dull day doesn’t sound great though does it!  Maybe I will have to look into a wind turbine after all!  Lol, early days yet.  

Looking to get my monitoring data together in the next week or so, I should be able to share some generation graphs overlayed with my usage.

Cheers

bardel

Well I have the SMA Sunny Tri-power connected up to the SMA portal as of yesterday and today’s the first day it’s recorded a full days production without me having to go to the garage and it’s produced a whopping 35.5kWh!!!  What a difference a day makes (nice clear sky).  Can’t wait to see what it does in the summer, I seriously need to get my house consumption split over the phases.

jouster

Just had a call from EDF to booknin my Smart Meter installation.

Didn’t know they were even coming yet so that’s good to know.

I know not much will change but it’s nice to know it’s finally happening

stephenc

I would refuse unless it's SMETS 2.

jouster

Why?  Care to shed any more info?

Went and had a read of some of the existing Smart MEter threwads and then spoke to EDF ( whilst giving a meter readin) and they confirmed it will be a SMETS1 meter they would be installing so for now I have cancelled that install and said I would look in again in the new year to see if anything has changed.

Thanks for the heads up.....going through the whole process a second time would be a bit of a waste of time