Sun power: My solar power array report

Nothing comes for free these days, even if they pitch it as free...Not even solar power comes for free. There's a lot of equipment required to collect solar power which must be paid for and so it's not free, not until the equipment and installation is paid for anyway.

We are lucky to be in that situation and so our solar array, installed back in 2016, is now generating free power as the system is paid off. If it's sunny, in fact even if it's cloudy, we collect sunlight and turn it into power. Free power. Cool huh?

Our solar array generates power during sunlight hours obviously so we have changed some of our habits to use our power as much as possible during the day. At night no power is generated and so any we use is imported from the grid, and paid for, so night time is our most costly time from a power perspective.

It balances out well though as on many days we don't use any power at all during the day and the excess we generate feeds automatically into the grid which they pay us a rebate for. It just comes off our bill reducing it commensurate to the amount we have fed to the grid. Over a year we find that we have generally only drawn a small amount from the grid and the feed-in helps offset the cost of what we have imported nicely. It would be great to be neutral however that would require the installation of battery storage and we don't have the money to do so at this stage, or the inclination to do it on this particular house which we will probably bulldoze at some point in the future.

Below you can see a snapshot of my lifetime solar array stats (2016-now) and the 2018 full-year stats.

It's interesting to note that over the lifetime of having the system we have produced 16.34MWh and consumed 17.80MWh meaning we have only imported 1.42MWh from the grid. This means we have only paid for that much power with the rest being generated by the sun. Considering we also get paid to deliver power back into the grid you can imagine how greatly reduced our power bills are.

The two images below show a snapshot of the same day in 2018 and 2019 being July 5th.

It's really interesting to note the difference. Firstly, on that day in 2018 we were not here as we were holidaying in Europe. The lack of power usage is clear here as 5.14kWh (in orange) which would be the items in my house that use power all the time like the fridge, standby lights on appliances and clocks etc. My mother in law was coming here daily to spend time with our cats too so she would have been using power.

Look at the production though, in blue. Only 1.53kWh which means it was a grey and rainy day with little or no sun to generate power. So we drew 3.61kWh of power from the grid and paid for it.

In contrast look at the right image, 5th July 2019. Obviously we are home so the usage is up, in orange, but so is production, in blue, as the day was clear and blue-skied with loads of sun. We drew 4.9kWh from the grid compared to the 3.61kWh on the same day in 2018, when we were in Europe, and that's with my wife here working all day! Naturally generating 13.77 kWh from the sun makes a huge difference and offsets the additional usage.

You will note we can determine exactly when we were producing (Blue), when we were drawing of solar (orange) and when we were drawing off the grid (grey). I can drill down on these reports hour by hour so we get a really clear picture of where we stand. Refer to the graphs below.

We are able to measure our usage stringently with the app that connects to our solar array however I really only check it month by month. Our power usage is predictable usually and remains fairly constant.

There are many days in which we push power back to the grid, sunny days when we are not home much for instance, and over a year it all balances out nicely to heavily reduce our power bills which is nice as life is expensive enough without adding to it.

We installed our solar array to reduce our power bills, the cost of the power we used. It helps the environment of course however that was not the motivation. We have an array of 16 panels and are considering throwing on 4 more which will probably neutralise our usage over production however it comes at a cost so we are not convinced yet.

How do you manage your power output and usage? Do you have a solar array, turn off appliances at the GPO (general power outlet), use LED lighting throughout your house (we do), or apply other power-saving techniques? Or do you simply use power as you need and not worry about the cost? Feel free to throw your comments down.

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