SOLAR PANELS in WINTER - Our Experience

hello and welcome back to the channel and welcome to another solar base video so with this one I just wanted to put together a bit of a quick kind of overview and review of our experience over winter and we're now in March or the end of March and since I've been solar installed back in August last year we've not actually seen that much benefit from it and I wanted to share kind of our experience in this video and whether soul is actually worth it for the winter months and that's what we're going to get into in today's video so just to give a bit of an overview of what we had installed back in August last year and we had 2400 watt um perlite solar panels fitted we had um a five kilowatt inverter from solar Edge we had a 9.7 usable capacity kilowatt um solar Edge battery to create a bit of a um Eco system from solar Edge um now the solar panels was paired or each solar panel had an solar Edge Optimizer on it that allowed to adapt each panel independently fault find independently and also benefit from any shading um so it doesn't affect the rest of the array now we had eight panels on a south facing roof slightly lower being on our garage um but then we had 12 on the rear of the bang on west facing which which are much higher and capture the sun to towards the end of the day now in August September when we had these installed the solar panels were producing upwards of 40 kilowatts per day now as we went into October this began to kind of degrade and then become unusable in November December and January as you can see from the graph now what I've got here on my iPad and I'll put it at the same on the screen so since having them installed what to try and really document the performance of solar panels and whether they're worthwhile to to kind of you guys uh and ourselves because this is a trail for us as well um I have recorded every single month um what are usages what our export is what our home consumption is um everything to do um around solar panels now on the graph you can see here I've done this as a percentage of our consumption coming from solar and from the Sun and this is a combination of our system so you've got battery that's supporting that now in August you can see um oh actually one other thing so I have an electric car and it's actually going soon and not for any bad reason but what I've done is I've separated out any electric vehicle charging to give us a percentage um of how much of our consumption has come from solar um with an EV and without an EV so we're split it I've split it into two columns which you can see on the screen now and I've just got the iPad just to uh guide me through it because there's a lot of figures um and I can't remember them so as you can see um we'll we'll go through each one uh month by month so at the bottom you've got August that's when we have the system installed Now with an EV so mind you my electric car does circa 30 000 mile a year so that's a lot of charging from home our consumption 57 of it came from the Sun so that's the solar power you know through the panels into the battery and then the car being on charge when working from home or days when we are in the house now if we if we remove that from um these figures and just base it on the house we produce 201 of what we consume so doubled um our requirements if you like now as the months go on and it starts to degrade now September we were on holiday for two weeks and then October he starts degrading but then he took a real drop in November December time so we've got without an EV 22 of um our power uh came from uh solar December it was down to 17 and I expect it to drop even further but what we were seeing is come January February this starts to pick up again so as you can see 20 January 27 and in February 42 um came uh from Seoul now I've not done the figures for March because I don't have them yet but what I am seeing is I think currently um what we on we're on the 25th of March now and we are about 300 kilowatt hours now that's nearly our consumption before we had a an EV for the month so we're already in March and we're produced we're kind of covering um or we're producing enough to cover our house base kind of usage so it's actually pretty good and we've only had kind of three months lull maybe four months where it's not really producing much and I'll touch on another point with that with the batteries shortly so that's without an EV so you've got you know you're down to as low as 17 um not great not really going to change your life Not Gonna Save loads of money um but then with an EV it's actually better than I expected so it went right down to seven and a half percent coming um from solar now it's not great but you make up for it in the summer months and that's kind of the message to get across now if we forget about the Eevee and we just look at the percentages of um how much solo produced in comparison to to our home Usage Now in winter and you've got to have a battery for this now you know you've got shorter days you've got darker you know cloudier days you've got rain you've got snow whatever it is um that's going to affect the production of solar now what we did with our 10 kilowatt battery or 9.7 kilowatt batteries we started to charge this up overnight now because I have an EV um but there is tariffs out there that will allow you to do this I believe still is we have a cheaper rate overnight so in the daytime our rate was 40 per kilowatt which is astronomical and not really viable um this that would get that was circuit giving us about a bill of around 200 pound a month based on our usage without an electric car what we were doing is charging this battery up um overnight during the cheap hour window which was one o'clock in the morning till 4am and that was giving us a Tempe kilowatt um charge so a 10 kilowatt battery at Tempe you know it's costing you a pound to charge the battery up fully and that took around two hours to do um so if you reach if you compare that down to a day rate if we did not have a battery um I think the the government contribution did it to 34 per kilowatt so to charge your battery up overnight or to charge up generally anywhere you would have cost you three pound forty now because we had a battery we had because we had a cheap overnight right we could charge that for less than a pound you know that's a third of the cost of you saving so then do that into your monthly uh budget we were saving Circa three pound per day 100 pound a month um that quite so so although the solar is not powering anything over the winter and we're still making savings by taking taking advantage of the cheap overnight rates um and maximizing that for them so 10 kilowatts was about enough for us to run our house during the day so as you can see uh from the figures and and what I'm trying to produce is kind of facts um there's a lot of myths behind uh having a solar PV system and don't remember wrong it's not cheap and if you check out some of my older videos that I've kind of explained exactly you know what it's cost us to have this installed and to be honest I had no benefit from actual solar production we've benefited from the battery side of things more than we have and the sun um side of it so as we move into March now you know in April um I'm estimating that March will will cover probably 120 maybe of our house demand um and then if we're going to April May June July that's just gonna the astronomical sort of incline up um to production where we're probably going to be producing 200 250 more than the house actually needs as mentioned uh my electric cars go in due to changing jobs so um I won't reap the rewards of charging and having kind of free mileage um so what we're doing now is looking at other uh tariffs which I think I'll cover in another video and because we've just joined a new tariff with octopus that gives us fantastic exporting rates so we'll see how that goes but overall you know we we've had it six months um I am actually really impressed with what he's done um there's a package with the battery um with the solar you know we we got a couple of months of good solar we've had winter with the battery being able to charge it saving circuit three pound per day um you know 90 pound a month that is where it's at and that's kind of my thought process with with this whole changing lifestyle that we're all doing that you know it's about managing it and it's about um reducing your bills as much as possible and maximizing efficiency with um how you manage your situation you know such as where we charge the battery overnight now as we're going into March now we've actually reduced our charging right down to only an hour um overnight just to top up for in the morning but during the day now we're getting much brighter days as you can probably see the sun's beam in my face so um that's topping us up so we're 100 by the end of the day and then we've also added now a hot water diverter which again I'll cover in another video so yes I do think um solar is worthwhile even for the winter months um but with a battery um as I've said in previous videos I think it comes as a system that I don't feel solar on its own is worthwhile um but when you compare that uh when you add in a battery it really becomes a system that's very useful um for households and you know if you're out in the day working you can't use the solar so you need the battery just to top up and and put in the bank ready for when you're at home in the evening when it goes dark so yeah really good few months and it's getting better and I was expecting probably you know six months of a Down time but you know with no more than four months and and it's done really well which I've held back in demonstrating the graph shown and in the in the figures and the percentages shown so please do give it a thumbs up if um if you found this video useful and it's helping you decide whether to go down the route of solar and please do drop any comments down below uh I always try and answer them from my experiences I can only give you facts from what I know um so very controversial topic so um yeah all I want to do is get the message out there of of our experiences and how it's going so thank you for watching please please make sure you subscribe for more videos to come of this nature in the near future thanks for watching cheers

Channel: DIY Journey

Views: 15,391

Keywords: Solar, Solar panels, Diy journey, Solar pv, Solaredge, Solar in winter, Oval renewables, Perlight solar panels, Green energy, Renewable energy, Diy, Home, Energy crisis, Cost of living, Money saving expert

Id: Au2XhdzDjC8

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023