Sunday, November 8, 2009

1 month of solar 10/7/09-11/8/09

I don't yet have a good monitoring solution so I'm going to just do Monthly Total Generation and Maximum Generation stats. So far it's looking good, even without my tree being trimmed so that the solar array is blocked at least partially every day here is what I generated:
Max Generated: 6686 W
Total Generated: 620KWh

So by my calculations from my records, even in winter with my system not receiving all the light it should because of my tree (getting that fixed next week) I am generating about two times more than I use any month of the year that I live by myself. During the summer I will generate a great deal more, and I haven't yet had a chance to use an energy monitor to get rid of the biggest uses of power. So I should be doing really great once the tree is trimmed and I've reduced my electricity usage even further through efficiency.

One thing this doesn't include is the power usage of the hot tub. I've only had it a month and a half and only 2 weeks of that was before the solar was functional. So I'm not sure how much power it is pulling a month. That is one of the things I want to use the energy monitor for. Even with the hot tub I should be generating more than I use every month of the year, and quite a lot more during the summer months. It looks like this plan is going to work out.

I'm not yet sure how to calculate my total savings, there are some confounding factors and I haven't quite come up with an algorithm that will take everything into account. So I may have to wait until I've had the whole set up for an entire year before I can calculate how long it will take for it to pay for itself.