Solar PV system experience
A few weeks back we had a 6.3/4.8 kW PV system installed. My 4 brothers and 5 sisters all have solar and most have had it for some time. One of the reasons we put off doing it was the awkward shape of our roof with none of it at optimised angles plus some occasionally shaded areas of roof. However one of my BILs is a solar engineer and explained how using panel optimisers or micro inverters would improve the efficiency and make it worthwhile. Anyway we went with 20 panels each with a micro inverter on 4 different roof segments. There is still 2 another roof segments with space for about 15 more panels in the future if we want to upgrade. Using micro inverters means we won't have to upgrade a large inverter.
With my broken ankle I have not had much to do except faff about on the forums and watch the solar PV output on the supplied App. It's very interesting for a nerd like me to watch things like the output of the individual panels and power consumption during the day. The highest output I've seen is 4.88kWhr and remember none of the roof segments are at an optimal angle so I'm pretty happy about that. It's also pretty clear when various appliances like the coffee machine (2kW) and the 3 house rev cycle inverter ACs kick in and remember to turn them off if they are not needed. It's also interesting to see how the ACs chew more power as the temperature climbs.
During the middle part of the day, provided there's no clouds, even when it's 40degC outside the solar provides the power to cover the 3 house ACs, plus 3 fridges, the smaller AC in the shed, plus an odd appliances like a washing machine or dishwasher. Even then we're still exporting some power.
On on cooler sunny days we're generating about the same amount of kWhrs as we use for the whole day and night, of course the excess produced during the day is exported and so we're still importing power at night. It will be interesting to see what happens in other seasons.
In two weeks there has been just 1, 15 min period where the power draw went over the 4.8kW output of the solar. Of course after about 4:30 pm there's a cross over period where output drops below use. That's a good time to remember to turn shed AC and coffee machine off. In the evening when it's been hot during the day we keep the house ACs running and power use depends on temp. Typically the power uses gets down to 1kWhr by midnight which is when 2 of the 3 house ACs go off just leaving just the bedroom AC on.
The worst case scenario is hot but cloudy, when power generation drops to as low as about 1/3 of use. Fortunately not that many days like that in Perth.
The evenings would be a good time have a battery but they're not quite there in terms of price but they don't need to come down much more to make worth considering.
The other thing I've done is checked out on Google earth how many dwellings in our St (inner city suburb) have Solar and it turns out only 3 out of ~100 have this. My son's st in the outer burbs has 44% with solar. Perth average is supposed to be 25% with some Streets over 50%. OK many of these are small systems but why so few in inner burbs? I guess they don't care much about high power prices?
Anyway so far so good and looking forward to see what it does to our power bills.