Today was a depressingly dull wet day, as reflected in the graph below where our system didn’t exceed 300 watts generation at any point, started generating much later than previous days, and finished earlier:
Power generated today: 1.392KW
Power generated so far: 20.382KW
Monday – I was back at work after the past 4 days off. It was a nice sunny day, with a few cloudy spells, as is fairly clear from the peaks and dips on the graph below:
You can see the general curve as the power level increases and then drops off. The curve is somewhat skewed towards the evening times because of our west-facing solar panels.
Power generated today: 6.517KW
Power generated so far: 19KW
Sunday – the day of rest… and even more power generated than yesterday:
The trend of the upward curve is more what I expected, and reflect that it was generally very sunny. The peak generation today was 1.458KW, the same as yesterday. I’m wondering if this might be our system’s peak generation capability – our system is rated as 1.9KW, but that is under ideal test conditions and nature is rarely that perfect. My guess beforehand was that we’d probably get about 1.5-1.6KW at best.
Power generated today: 6.186KW
Power generated so far: 12.473KW
So, day two – Saturday morning. I was a bit excited to see that it was already generating power as I had breakfast. From the graph below you can see that there was a duller period from about 1pm till 4:30pm:
I changed the graph just to show daylight hours so that it is easier to interpret. I was very impressed with the peak of 1.458KW at about 16:40 and the couple of slightly lower ones that followed.
Power generated today: 4.576KW (which is approximately what I have estimated our average daily generation across the whole year will be).
So I woke up at about 7:30 and, excited, came down stairs to check how much we were generating, given that it was a nice sunny morning (although the sun rises at the back of the house, so the peak generation would be in the afternoon). I was disappointed to find the Sunny Beam monitor reading “0W” as being generated.
I took a few pictures of the house to get a feel for the light levels:
It certainly looked like there should be light enough to me, but I wondered it we’d just been over promised for a west-facing system (given that a south facing one is considered to be much better since it gets stronger lighting through most of the day).
I waited until 9am and it still wasn’t generating anything, despite even better light:
I checked the Sunny Boy inverter in the loft and it was still reading 140V like the evening before when the light had been much worse, so I suspected that there was actually a problem.
I waited until 10am, when the sun was starting to catch the corner of the top right panel and, as it still wasn’t generating anything, phoned the company that had fitted it. The guy that coordinates the solar part of the business (they also do windows and conservatories) wasn’t there, but I spoke to one of his colleagues. She advised she’d get the electrician to call me. The electrician called soon after and I explained the situation – he advised he’d call once he was done at the client he was at today.
He called at 2:40pm and arrived a little after 4pm. He resolved the problem and the system started generating at just after 5pm. It turned out that the fitters had connected some of the panels up incorrectly so that they weren’t attached to the system. Finally we were actually generating power.
Below is the graph of my first day:
The peak point just after the system started working was 1.4 Kilowatts. If it had been working all day, I’m sure I’d have seen some even higher values.
I had been hoping to be able to recommend the company that fitted the panels, but sadly between this and the lack of communication (such as about how the system was actually going to be laid out, verse what the sales guy had told us; when the scaffolding was going to be fitted; when the fitters and electrician would come; when we can expect to receive our certificate to register with our power company; etc), we really can’t recommend them, thus why their name will not be appearing in this blog.
Power generated today: 1.711KW
Scaffolding had been put up yesterday, and two fitters arrived before 8am (yawn!). They cracked on getting their equipment and getting the ladders up which had been left in the back garden.
The electrician arrived not long after and first had a look at the fuse box, then in the loft, and then discussed with us where the power cable would come in and where we wanted the isolator and generation meter.
By 9am the fitters were already drilling and cutting the mounting frame which the panels were to be attached to. I did want to watch and photograph their progress, but unfortunately at that point it started to rain quite heavily (which obviously the fitters weren’t too impressed about either).
I saw the fitters start taking the panels up the ladder around 11-11:30, and by 1pm they had finished and left. The electrician stayed until 4:30pm, by which time (due to the thick clouds) it was very dull, so he concluded that was why it wasn’t working currently due to lack of light. He advised that the system was only showing 140V and the inverter needed at least 180V to operate.
Here is what we had fitted:
8 Samsung LPC250SM panels (4 each side of the roof) at the front.
1 Sunny Boy 1700 power inverter.
1 Sunny Beam wireless monitor.
and the meter and three different isolators, one of which you can see in the picture below next to the generation meter.
Power generated today: 0 Watts