How did the new system go by the end of the day? Happy with the output?
How did the new system go by the end of the day? Happy with the output?
Yield of 35kW and revenue of $5.37, on a cloudy day with patches of sun. So it will do better on a sunny day.
So if we conservatively assume it will have revenue of about $5 a day or about $1500 a year, then it will pay for itself in about 2 years.
I was interested to see it started working about 5am and the shot up rapidly about 6.45am and stayed up.
It's cloudy now but still showing real time yield of 3.25kW, so that's good.
All through winter too?
Edit: For the 2019 year my 8kW system earnt $1730 in feed-in and saved $920 of grid power charges so $2650 benefit, less opportunity earnings of the cost of the installation which was very little in this low interest rate climate. If this continues and no servicing charges then about 4.5 years to recoup the installation cost. However I'm not confident that the 20-21c FIT that I've had will continue for very long.
Mine went up slightly recently from 20c with 3% disc on usage to 21c and no disc on usage. The 3% usage disc was about $3.50 for the previous quarter so insignificant compared with a 5% FIT increase. Maybe I'm unnecessarily pessimistic about the future of the current reasonably high FIT.
The solar installation rebates have been winding back each year for a number of years, as per the original formula to eventually discontinue them.
Ours was processed before the reduction from January 1.
The $5 figure came from yesterday, which was a mixture of sunny and cloudy periods, so I thought it might be an average, but it's far too early to be sure.
A fully sunny day would give much higher numbers while today, which was actually a day with no sun, only had a yield of 18kW and revenue of $2.88.
It will be interesting to see how it works out over a year.
Our installation cost was only $3277, because the house already had 2.9 kW of solar when we bought it, so the lower cost of the upgrade to 6.8 makes it quicker to recoup.
I'm feeling virtuous.
Since our upgrade on Tuesday we've saved 70.4 kg of CO2 and 3.8 trees, according to our solar ap. That was on overcast and rainy days, so imagine how much better we could do on sunny days.
[emoji41]
We've also earned enough to almost pay for 3 lattes, so that has to be good.
[emoji1]
Now saved 10.8 trees and 184kg of CO2, so that's all good. [emoji41]
More importantly, lots of rain has meant lower yield and revenue (185kW and $29), but today looks like being a good day with lots of sunshine.
I still think long term we are likely to average about $5 a day in revenue.
The son, who has 6.5 kW of solar, got his latest quarterly power bill recently - it was a whole $2!
He's since changed plans and expects to be in credit next quarter.
It's amusing being able to monitor this online. When the solar goes right down, I know it's raining.
The wife laughs at me.
This is a cool link and site where long term testing of many panels is easy to check on
I use a lot if not all of my work solar. Wish I could at home but batteries are still a bit pricing to time shift day to night [biggrin]