Wednesday 20 April 2011

Generation game

The sun is shining, and here's a chart of how our solar panels have been doing since November. We can get information on the kWh of electricity generated by the photovoltaics, but we don't have any information on kWh generated by the solar thermal panels. Instead, the number of hours of pump operation acts as a proxy; the pump operates when the temperature of the circulating fluid in the panels is more than 2 °C higher than the temperature of the solar hot water cylinder.


The design documents included some figures for expected electricity generation by month. So far, the PVs have done as well as or better than expected, and we're on course to beat April as well... not particularly surprisingly.

2 comments:

  1. How many KW of pv do you have? About 10?

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  2. 12kW, which is a bit daft financially as it's at the lower end of a FITs band. Efficiency is a bit lower because the pitch is only 13 degrees.

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