Yesterday I forgot to switch over from solar back to the mains and by the time I did he alarm was already going as the batteries were on 32%. This is not a problem and need to learn how to turn the alarm off. This is not a big problem as the equipment is located in an outside room and you would need to be in the vicinity to hear it. The alarm is triggered once the battery levels reach 40% and the solar automatically turns off once it reaches 20%. Once it starts to recharge again it automatically turns back on so there is no need to do anything but wait.
We have only been running the solar since the 12th December so roughly 16 days and again this is not full time either. The first few days we only turned on mid morning and not at 5am which we have only started recently. The sun does not need to be out as longa as there is light the batteries start charging immediately.
If we look at the stats we have already generated 403 Kwh of power which is roughly worth R1300 or $75. Another 104 Kwh was discharged which would have been nice if that had gone back to the grid. This is only half a month and I expect we will generate around 1200 Kwh per month without too much effort if we can get the switching on and off timings right.
Yesterday we generated and consumed 37kwh of power in a 16hour time frame which gives me a general idea of what we would use over a 24 hour period. I would guess we are in the region of 80Kwh per day which is what I would consider heavy usage and can be reduced. This mind you does not include the swimming pool pump which I have turned off currently as that is another project that needs sorting out in the new year.
My electrician believes that some of the older flood lights that have blown ad are not working are still draining power and could be where quite a large chunk of the load is disappearing. 90% of the house is on LED energy saving light bulbs so using nearly 40Kwh in 16 hours or 2.5Kwh per hour should be far less. If we can find the source of the problem and reduce this by half we can go through the night on the equipment we already have. We are currently down one battery which is being sorted when the suppliers reopen in the New Year which gives me even more hope knowing we have an extra 5Kwh to play with.
As you can see there is an urgency to be self sufficient to some degree at least and if one considers what we have generated over the last 16 days with the new prices this would equate to roughly $100. The costs are telling me to go fully off and I now need to see this through with another R40K invested.
Another 8 panels are on order and I am still deciding whether to grab another 2 storage batteries at the same time. That would seriously enhance the performance and guarantee us being off the grid entirely. The overcast and rainy days have proven there is enough power being generated and the extra panels will help keep the batteries fully charged no matter what weather conditions we experience.