Hmmm

It's been an interesting month so far, the weather has shown many hints as to what the solar panels are capable of, but never really delivered that well. Hence the run rate chart for March is ticking along nicely, but without ripping up any trees. At the moment the yield for March is looking to be similar to February. I'm just waiting for the magical moment when the weather breaks for a few days (it might be now) and we get glorious uninterrupted sun for a while - that's got to be worth 40 kWhs in the bank in one go.

I have to say that now I can see the system doing it's thing day in day out I am impressed. Now that the days are longer and the sun's angle is much higher, even cloudy days create a healthy reading on the Owl meter - 700+ watts when the sun isn't out is not to be sniffed out, and peak readings over 3000 watts are always welcome! I need to reach about 900 watts to be self sufficient, so this is always the unofficial target to my way of thinking.

We finally received our first payment from the power company a few weeks ago, as expected this was just over £180 and a BACS transfer receipt came by mail. It's good to know that things can only really get better from here on as we go into the better part of the year.

I've been having some thoughts about adjusting the run rate charts to allow for varying sun angle and day length. For example during March the days are two hours longer at the end of the month than the beginning and the sun is many degrees higher. Hence the productivity of the system and the target should not be linear, and should accelerate towards the end of the month. I may well experiment with this and see what the results will look like, at its simplest level this will change the 'run rate' target into a form of parabola with which to compare performance.