My first full month of Solar energy production was this weekend. I was excited to see how it performed. As just a quick reminder, we installed a 32 panel system rated at 13kWh, and 4 Enphase Battery Backups.
Pretty much as expected, maybe not quite as good as hoped. This first month however will be one of the worst months for us in terms of usage and production. It's the hottest month of the year for us, with AC running nearly all the time. It also happens to be the storm and hurricane season here which means lots of thunderstorms and clouds in the afternoons killing my prime production hours. I definitely underestimated the impact of the storm season, clouds, and the vehicle charging with the extra driving I've been doing.
Here's the breakdown by week. Pretty consistent, I'm hoping to see much better numbers continuing to increase over the next 3 months as the hot weather and storm season ends. The AC units (we have 2 to cool the house) are definitely the largest drain by far exceeding all other use combined.
Overall Energy Independence 36%. Again not bad for what will likely be the worst month of the year. Will be interesting to watch this grow. One of the sunny days was over 51%.
This chart shows daily produced and consumed for each day of the month. You can see there were clearly some really poor production days with cloud cover. We still exported 453 kWh back to the grid during times of over-production.
This one shows an average days usage and production curve. The drastic orange clump at the right is where I plugged in the car after a long day of driving. You can see that doubles the consumption for several hours. The weekly 3 hour round trip drives to the hospital treatments will also end after next month which will greatly improve the stats. That one day of driving is more than I normally do in a month!
Here is a more normal day input and output without the car charging. Still lost a bit to clouds.
This shows the cost savings estimate (based on usage fee estimates) to have saved over $209 off our electric bill this month. We will still get a bill, but it's projected to be about $195 instead of over $400.
According to my vehicle charger, $42.15 of that cost or about 324.224 kWh of that usage is from vehicle charging.
For more details on the system, the install and licensing, see my previous post here:
@ksteem/weekend-solar-install-with-battery
I hope you enjoyed the update. I'll provide another at the 6 month mark in January that should show more improvements.