Workmen have finished - now generating power

[watervole]

It's 1:30pm and the workmen have already finished.  It's a sunny day and my electricity meter is currently running backwards (the electricity company will be along in a few weeks to install a new meter).

The scaffolding will come down today or tomorrow.

This seems like a very good time to do some laundry, while the sun is shining and I'm generating at around 1.8KW. 

My little portable energy monitor shows current through the wire - it can't tell direction, so it shows the net flow.   It's showing 1.5KW, though the little meter the solar people installed in my meter cupboard is showing 1.8KW as that is the generation figure.  I typically use 2-300W during the day when I'm not using anything beyond the computer and the freezers.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

\o/

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Excellent, that sounds like an impressive quick job! And 1.8 kW is really quite a lot of power. Hope it makes a big difference to the bills.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

It's only going to generate that much on nice sunny days like today. I'd expect the average to be much lower. And there is also the factor that even with the washing machine on its spin cycle, I'm still generating 900W more than I'm using.

So a lot of what I generate won't be used by me, personally. I'm expecting to come out ahead by £5-£10 per month, so we'll see how that works out over time.

There'll be less hours of daylight in the winter, and the sun will be lower in the sky as well, so I expect to generate a lot less then.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Ours have been up 52 days now, and in that time have generated a total of 91.1 kWh, so an average of 1.75 kWh / day. But this has varied from just 0.1 or so on cloudy days to a high of 7.0 the day before yesterday. Eight or nine sunny days have been responsible for more than half the total generation so far. I think our peak rate so far has been about 1.3 kW, so it sounds like your installation is probably bigger than ours.

It would be interesting to know what's your normal electricity usage pattern across the day, and to what extent you're able to shift heavy uses into daylight hours. Thinking about our own pattern, it would be pretty difficult, because things like washing and computing I already do during the day: the evening is mostly lights.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

That all sounds good so far.

[jon-a-five.livejournal.com]

Really cool.