steevc cross-posted this post in Solar energy 13 days ago


Weekend after Weekend and annual Solar Report

in Weekend Experiences14 days ago

I don't know about anyone else, but this has been a great month. First off, it seems we've had weekend after weekend with the two major holidays falling in the middle of the week. For us, I had Xmas eve and Xmas off work, in addition to New Year's Eve and New Year's Day off. Then of course the weekend in-between, before, and now after coming up. I could absolutely get used to working only Mon, Thurs, Fridays.

One of the things I do each weekend, is check on our Solar Production (actually more often because it's cool for me to see the data charts).

As just a quick review, we installed a 32 panel system rated at 13kWh, and 4 Enphase Battery Backups rated at 5kWh each (20 kWh total battery). For more technical details, see my Previous Post Here.

I just thought I'd share how we've done now that we've got 6 months of production reports. First, the annual (6 months) report summary.

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Overall, looks like we produced about $923 worth of electricity from our Solar Panels in the 6 months of use. We produced 7.1 MWh of energy for the 6 months, and exported 2.5 MWh back to the grid.
The environmental impact is apparently equal to a CO2 Reduction of 5.1 tons, a planting of 85 trees, or charging of 610 Thousand phones.

For us, a key consideration in our purchase was also investing in the battery backups vs. buying a propane generator for the frequent power outages here due to Hurricanes and Tropical Storms. You can see how the battery backups performed for us during Hurricane Milton in this Previous Post.

Here are the monthly breakdowns from mid-July (install) thru December.

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This system has micro-inverters on each panel, so that if one panel goes down or is blocked by shade/clouds, the other panels keep producing. Here you can see that each panel in the Array performed pretty consistently, averaging from 219-224 kWh production. The plan is to wait for the tax rebates this year, then invest in another 8-12 more panels for even more savings and ability to produce more than we use for eventual rebate from the power company. Not sure if that will get us there, but will get much closer.

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Looking forward to the next full year report!