After a year of production.

Not to much more to tell. Here is the latest readings.

Removing the partial  from 1st month, I have a 1 years production at 10615 Kilowatts.
This gives me a financial payment of $8513.20. for the year. Of course Hydro charges me $6 a month to read the meter. And insurance is still costing $750 a year. This gives me a return after 1 year at $7691.20 or 9%
Not the 11.39% I had calculated and hoped for in the beginning, but still not a bad return. And with the improvements I should have a better winter. Hope you all do too.

Cheers

Inverter repair job

OK now the numbers are looking a little better. We had an inverter die on us in June. This put me 1 panel down. That's a 2% reduction in output, so we would have made projection if it was working in July.

Now fixing it wasn't easy. I sent the installer a note. System has not been running for a year yet. He responded by telling me that he had been having trouble dealing with Enphase, so I was on my own. Not exactly the response I was hoping for. Anyway I phoned the Enphase help line. Waited for an hour and a half to talk to a live body. He was disappointed that I had already swapped the inverter with another location said that I should not do this on my own. Don't understand why not. Not a fun job but it can be done.

 He said he would put a request for a RMA number in. Then I waited a week. No info from them at all. I then sent an e-mail to every address I could find for them. 2 days later I finally got a response that a ticket number had been generated. That's all they said. Didn't know what that meant. But 2 days later I received a new inverter in the mail. Complete with a return postage for purolator. Put it up that night. Then I took my sheet with the Mac address numbers and updated it with the new locations of the 2 inverters. The one I originally swapped and the location of the new one. Sent the the new information to the Enphase web site. 2 days later and web page is back up and running fine. Whole thing took about 5 weeks. 

While I was up on the roof. I decided to get ready for next winter. Had a problem with the snow not coming off by itself. One main reason is that there is a gap between the rows of panels.

When the snow slides off of the top panel it gets stuck on the gap to the next one. Then it freezes on at night and you won't get it off until a warm day. And then the panel won't produce. It's dark after 5:00 here so I really didn't want to remove the snow until the weekend. When I could see what I am doing. This problem really reduces the system output. So I moved the panels together. This should help. Next I stated cutting off the bolts. They are all sticking up.

I bought snow rake last year. It is made of plastic so it won't scratch the panels. But it gets caught on every stud that is sticking up. So I took each one off and cut it to size.

This should work a lot better. We will let you know. 

So September is coming. When it is complete I will have been running for 1 year. I will give you a report on what the return on investment is at that time. So see you later.

2011 Tracking

Again same chart as before. Green area is the predicted output for the Back and Garage Panel arrays.Dark blue area is the recording of Kilo Watt Hours as per Enphase recording from the inverters.Light blue readings is the reading from the Ontario Hydro Meter. % of forecast is comparison from the PvWatts program and the actual Hydro meter.

Please return to this chart as I will be updating each month as the readings come in.

So stay tuned.

2010 Wrap up

Well December was a little disappointing. Check out my updated chart.

As this shows we only made 45.94 % of my forecast. Not good. So I checked my Enphase site, and checked on Dec 27th.

This was a clear cloudless day, so why is the output so erratic? Just need to look in the back yard.



Although trees are good for the planet, they are not so good for solar power production. As this month has the shortests days in the year, it also has the sun lower in the sky then any other month. I just hope it doesn't affect January too much.  

1st Cheque

Well it really wasn't a cheque but, it sure is good to see the funds going into the bank instead of out. We received $856.81 for the time from Sept 21st to Nov 4th. This looks accurate to me. The numbers on the chart are from the 1st of every month. This is so I can compare to the predicted numbers from the PVWatts program. Number so far have been encouraging. December is not looking good. Too much snow.

Had 6" on the whole roof from yesterday. On any previous snow falls, it seemed to slide off. Today it took 2 hours to clean it off. Sure glad we don't have a 2 storey house.

First readings

It's the end of our first whole month so we can now see how well we are doing. Here is a small print out of the readings. Numbers are in Kilo Watt Hours. September's reading is what we generated from the 21st to the end of the month. I want to track from the 1st day in the month in order to be able to compare to the predictions as accurately as I can.

Note: Hydro Meter is accumulative. Therefore the difference from the first of one month to the first of the next month is the Amount of energy generated.

What you see in green is the predicted hours I should generate, and the numbers I relied on to predict the return on investment. This was using the PV-Watts program.The dark blue Enphase numbers are what you will also find on the  Enphase link in the blog. It is what the inverters are telling Enphase what they are producing. As you can see they do not match what the Hydro meter is saying. I am not sure why yet, I am investigating. The good news is even the hydro meter shows a 3% improvement over the prediction for first month and 32% for the second. Very happy with that. Don't know if it is going to hold so stay tuned. I will update again next month.

Hooked up and on line

As you can see we didn't get 3 rows of 14 on the back roof. Do to the position of the cross braces and vent pipes in the road we only got 2 rows of 13 and 1 row of 12 on the large rear roof. We did however find out that we could put a second row on the front garage roof.

This gave us 4 more panels there for a total of 2 KiloWatts at the front. I have updated the predictions in my calculations page to reflect these changes. ROI stays pretty close to the same as it was. We also have retained the 9.6 total system capability.

The big days was Tuesday September 21st.  Hydro did a disconnect.

This did require them to move some bushes on the neighbors lot. Hope they aren't too pissed about that.  They then installed the double meter box, had it inspected, and turn our power back on, all in one day. It did take some time to schedule that everyone would be here on the same day. Panel now looks like this. Switch was turned on at 3:15PM.

I have some trim work to finish up.

To see how well the system is performing you can take a look at my Enphase web site. It will show you a total history of all the power that has created. http://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/nJC57822

The display shows the panels are tilted to reflect the angle that they are actually facing. I will track actual meter readings and compare the output to my predictions, so stay tuned for more updates.