Tuesday, March 6, 2012

The first 11 days

I can now track the performance of my solar system from my desk. It is surprising how often I have found myself checking to see how it was doing. Since I sit in a cube with no view of the windows at work, I can now tell what the weather is without standing up just by seeing how much power I am generating at the time.

Of the first 11 days I have had the system, it has been relatively sunny 9 of those days. We did have 2 days of rain last week, and I was surprised that I still was generating power on those days (although significantly less than on sunny days. In the first 11 complete days, the system generated 211.6 KWh of power, an average of over 19 KWh a day. That jumps to 22.5 KWh a day when the 2 rainy days were excluded.

My typical consumption last month was around 70 KWh a day. Baseline for my zone in PG&E land is 28.6 KWh a day during the winter months. So, the solar system is not dropping me all the way down to Tier 2 (up to 130% of baseline), but it does get me down below the cutoff for tier 3 (200% of baseline). Of course, right now I am really only generating power between 7:30am and around 4:30pm. In a few months, I should get a good 2 more hours of generation time, which would give me another 10-12 KWh of power a day.

I can't calculate the savings until I get my first PG&E bill, but this is the first time I can say I am looking forward to seeing a bill.

2 comments:

  1. Can't you look online at your PG&E account to get s "real time" usage update? We can here in CT with our utility company.

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  2. Nope, I used to be able to, but when they switched my meter out for the new solar compatible one, I lost that feature.

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