Friday 5 November 2010

Zero point one!

This is October's report though it's now 5th November - Fireworks are going off all around. In the summer, I tried to predict what my lowest figure for a day's generation would be. I seem to remember guessing it would be one or two units. Yesterday came in at a paltry 0.1 kWh! Wow. It can hardly get any less. There have also been other days with 0.2 and 0.3 units and sunny days have peaked around seven units. Amazing how a heavy Atlantic front cuts out the light. Here is the graph of production thus far:

The profound reduction as we head into late autumn is very apparent. My 30-day average to today is 3.68 units while the average since I started has just gone below ten at 9.84 units. Still hoping it stays above 6.85 units come 18 May. Overall, I think the panels are performing to expectations or better. It will be interesting to see how much the deepening winter will cut the power further.

One other thing. I sent a meter reading to EDF on 13 September which should yield over £550. This has still to appear in my account. I phoned them after six weeks and it was nicely pointed out that payments can take up to 90 days. I hadn't expected that. At this rate, my summer peak will arrive in time for Christmas.

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2 comments:

  1. Neil23 November 2010 at 21:22

    Interesting blog. My pv panels were installed in August and are working well. Two questions. How much energy does the system utilise - I can't find out anywhere although somebody mentioned 50w when in operation. I only ask because when it is dull it sometimes generates as little as 60w and I'm wondering if most of this is used to power itself. Secondly I don't believe the electricity companies estimates that you export 50%. I don't have a smart meter so it is impossible to tell accurately but I estimate that I export 70% (we are out most of the day when it is sunny and have a very low electricity usage during the day). This means that the reduction in my electricity bill is less than I expected (say the system can generate 60% of our usage and 30% used by ourselves ie a fall of only 18%). Not that this matters too much as the main income is from the generation element of the FIT and it doesn't matter who uses it.

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  2. moonbeams5 January 2011 at 23:23

    I've never heard a figure for how much energy the system uses. Interesting question. I assumed it would be tiny, enough to run the little monitoring gizmo on the inverter and this would be a handful of watts. On your second point, if I gave the idea that the electricity company *estimates* that I export 50%, then I gave the wrong impression. Until we get smart meters that can measure where we send our power, the government has *deemed* that we will get the export tariff for 50% of our units. I guess until we measure it, we won't know. Thanks for taking an interest in the blog.

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