Two Years of Solar

Well, I guess the novelty wears off just a bit – the two-year anniversary of our solar anniversary came and went on June 29 w/o much fanfare or notice!Still, worth looking back at how we did.  The image above is from my array data at pvoutput.org, and shows how much we made vs. how much we used (consumption only started tracking in Oct ’10) each month for the past couple years.

11 x 230W Siliken Panels, Enphase Microinverters

The production meter on the side of the house is showing 6669 kWh (or 6.66 MWh) since we turned it on.    So on the production side, we’ve done:

  • Avg 3335 kWh annually
  • Avg 278 kWh monthly
  • Avg about 9 kWh per day
  • Max monthly was 375kWh this June
  • Min monthly was 103kWh in Dec 2010

We pay a bit over $0.10/kWh, so it’s offset about $675 in utility costs.  No Swiss bank account yet, but it does help with the cash flow a little – we’ve even had a couple months with net negative use, which is fun.

On the consumption side, since we installed it, we have consumed about 9000 kWh to run the house, so we’ve produced 75% of the electricity we’ve used.  Not bad!  (We have worked pretty hard to keep consumption under control, too).  For comparison, 9000 kWh consumption in 2 years is:

  • Avg 4500 kWh annual consumption
  • Avg 375 kWh monthly consumption
  • Avg 12k Wh daily consumption
  • Max monthly consumption was 550 kWh in July 2011
  • Min monthly consumption was 271 kWh in Oct 2010

There has been zero maintenance for the system, other than (optionally) knocking snow off now and then.  If you want to see more about the system from when it was getting installed, take a look at the “Renewable” blog category over on the right.

You can see more data for my system on Enphase’s public monitoring site and on my pvoutput.org page.

One thought on “Two Years of Solar

  1. Congrats Eric & Family! Being a solar family is fun, whether you’re in Colorado or Minnesota! It’s funny that we both have had solar for almost exactly the same amount of time — wonder who’s going to get the EV to add to the PV first (my guess is you guys, actually, given that we’re at least two years away from an EV right now).

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