What has YOUR solar PV system generated THIS month?

SteveCritten

Yes we are lucky for sure, but where is your incentive to buy? What is the efficiency of your panels?

kraiklyn

The incentive was to offset some of our daily usage rather than purchase kwh at retail. We've calculated a 8-10 year pay back depending on our consumption/export rates. Our panels are rated at 16.21 efficiency which seemed pretty good.

SteveCritten

That pay back isn't too bad really and the efficiency is good too so still worth buying even without a subsidy. Because so many people in Oz buy them the systems seem dirt cheap there. If they got the price down more people would buy them here I think they are artificially high because of the subsidy.
I got mine on the higher subsidy (FIT tariff) and it cost £8k within a month they were down to £5k.

kraiklyn

Yeah, most stuff drops in price after a while I guess! Your Return On Investment would be fairly short with that FIT I reckon? We mainly got a system to generate our own power and offset our usage, (we have a few power hungry products like a spa, etc) especially as power prices start to rise. It makes sense for us to use as much as the generated power as its worth more to us than exporting power back to the grid. So our import/export meter is only there to ensure any surplus doesn't get wasted.

I've been surprised about making an avarage of 300kwh over each month in the 3 months of winter, I'm looking forward to seeing some stats in summer now! My best day yet in winter has been about 17.5kwh so no idea what to expect when the days get longer and the sun more intense?

SteveCritten

That's some brilliant figures for winter mate my worst month was when we had the bad snow and I had to walk the 12 miles to work, it was around 120kwh

stephenc

120? I've had under 30 for the entire month of January.

kraiklyn

One day in midwinter (June) I got a measley 0.38kwh for the whole day!

stephenc

Yeah, but wait until your summer and you'll be getting over 30kwh per day.

In fact, I was visiting the North Island for 2 weeks in March this year, and you had great late summer weather.  I couldn't believe more people didn't have PV and/or Thermal.

SteveCritten

Just rechecked my bills and I got it wrong Feb 2013 I missed Jans reading so it was for 2 months and it was 173kwh. So an average of 86.

kraiklyn

Yeah, it's been really slow to take off here, but the overall price of systems has fallen a lot in the last 3 years to a point where it's worth investing in as long as you are happy with a 10 year pay back period.

Lots of people have solar hot water tubes installed on theier roof over here, but there's not a lot of PV yet. My local school just installed a 90kw system, so it's getting out there as more people see the value in it. 95% of houses have no central heating, and many doesn't even have double glazing yet so solar is not top of peoples priorities, especially on Kiwi wages.

I'll post back some data from Dec/Jan/Feb later on and see what the average yields are looking like. I'm on the mainland (South Island) so will not genenerate as much as those up in the far North, but (probably optimistically!) hoping for 5500 - 6000 for the year. We'll see!