Happy new year! As I write this the rain is hammering down and it has been really windy. The solar panels seem secure though. We were away for a few days over Christmas and this is when our system had another glitch. It has been fine for six months since the installer did some fixes, but the same breaker tripped again for reasons unknown. I shall report it again. I am not sure the inverter is reporting the correct figures for that period. I reset it when I got back and it is working for now. We cannot expect a lot of generation at this time of year when the days are short and the sun does not get high, but the days are getting longer now.
We spent a little less on power than in November. That may be related to being away and not charging the car as often. Those spikes will be when it was plugged in, but will mostly be on cheap rate. The other savings come from using the battery which gets charged up each night and so we use hardly any peak rate power which is three times the price of off peak. A lot of people could benefit just from having a battery, but solar will pay for itself in the long run.
The government has plans to build a lot of new houses and they really ought to all have some panels. I see some that just have a few and that seems like a token effort. They will have people doing the roof anyway, so why not fit more panels that are pretty cheap?
I did not expect to export much power as the sun can barely keep the battery topped up during the day. We did get some sunny days though.
In a couple of months we will have had a full year of solar power, so I shall do more in depth analysis then to see what the savings are. As the export payments have gone up this year should earn us a lot more.
I just saw this piece about small installations in Ukraine. Fitting some panels to your balcony is quite popular in Germany and it could help people who suffer frequent power outages. I read that these systems may not be legal in the UK as you are not supposed to just plug a power source into the existing ring main. Mine is more protected and will shut off if the mains goes down for safety reasons. People can run off-grid systems with a battery to keep appliances going.
Have a great year.
