Year end figures, where are you and what is your plan?

[Stinsy]

So I hope Nowty Towers (including transport) to be 100% carbon neutral (or negative) when Ripple WT2 starts up.

BUT, I still eat meat and am still looking forward to nice holidays, so I still have work to do.

You don’t fancy road trips in the Tesla replacing air travel?

Yeah, but I don't quite fancy driving via Basra and Baghdad on my way back from Dubai.

Algarve is plenty doable, as is Italy, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places!

[Sunrisemike]

here are my numbers since 2011. payment calculated at 48p. Doesn't include export, which I think is a fair bit.
N. coast IOW, 4 KW split over two roofs.

Mike

[Marcus]

Probably used about 50kwh of grid leccy this last 12 months but would have to dig up the statements from BG (was on ebico - now with octopus) to be sure. Alas now paying standing charge which will be around £50 this year as I got £50 discount by following a recommend a friend link when I joined - will be full amount next year. Does beg the question of: do I stay connected to the grid or not?

Currently have ~2kw pv connected to my system along with the hydro (~400w atm). One string of my 2005 vintage AGM battery went down this autumn so I'm down to 260Ah @ 24v nominal. I've not decided what to do about the battery yet -if anything.

Plans:-

About 3 - 5 months ago I bought another 3.5kw of pv from its technologies: 1400w of ja solar 345w panel and 2kw of ja solar 410w bifacial - I had a feeling the price of pv was going to go up and felt I could do with more as GW seems to be giving us more longer drier spells that shut down the hydro.

I'm still working on installing the panels - putting them on ground mounts would have been too easy so I'm mounting the 345w high on the side of the barn ese facing, and the bifacials will be on the roof of the barn angled ssw on a North sloping fibre cement roof - idea being they'll get the light coming off the white roof surface on overcast days. There's not much daylight time or conducive weather ATM for getting the panels up, and tbh, when the hydro working well there's not the motivation ( the rain came back within 4 days of the panels arriving here).

Still haven't quite decided how to connect the new panels either: if got enough spare gtis to ac couple (plan a) but as the primary inverter is an '8kw' powerjack (I.e. 2kw) backfeeding with another 3.5kw of pv on to of the 1kw already ac coupled might be tricky without some control. I do have a spare immersun but that doesn't like the tl4000 gti - goes into oscillation.

Plan b in the short term might be to ac couple to the Nat grid and immersun to the immersion and storage heaters - if only to test the panels.

Plan c is buy/ make some mppt controllers for dc connection, but they're £££ to buy and time consuming to make.

[AlBargey]

I've added more solar to the barge over the last year, and we're now fully off grid for the time being at the current mooring, I was hoping to add more solar panels in the hope of being self sufficient in the winter, but in reality with shading we'd need 20kW+ of panels and there isn't really enough roof space It also looks like no suppliers in the UK are getting any of the JA Solar 490w + oversize panels anymore and they're almost 50% more expensive for the 460w ones since Brexit and Covid kicked in. So my plans of swapping out 900w of panels from the other forum hosts to 2kW of JA Solar is on hold.

Future energy efficiency plans are to plumb in the Akvaterm thermal store and wire up the Immersions from the Victron for AC solar diversion, and an extra layer of rockwool in the roof.




I'm pleased to see even without all the solar being installed for the whole year we generated 82% of all our needs
3604kWh = 9.9kWh/day average



Frustratingly the above Victron graph only displays directly consumed generator power, a large portion of the battery power in the last month was charged from the genny, but the current Victron graphs don't show it yet.



More solar was used to charge the battery than direct use as expected. We have a Flooded Lead acid bank.



Our round trip efficiency (RTE) - Charged energy vs discharged energy - for the batteries is currently showing around 84% - It was 85.5% before we started running the genny more frequently to give the batteries a good charge. I'll try and keep them in the more efficient sweet spot of 50-85% SOC with a biweekly 100% top up.

If we had Lithium batteries with an @ 98% RTE or 14% more efficient we could save ourselves 1.4kWh/day - but to buy an equivalent size bank £££.. maybe the next boat though

[Stinsy]

I remember seeing panels at the 22-25p/W price point. No longer it seems.

How are these for jumbo panels?

https://www.bimblesolar.com/655w-canadian-solar-panels

[AlBargey]

I remember seeing panels at the 22-25p/W price point. No longer it seems.

How are these for jumbo panels?

https://www.bimblesolar.com/655w-canadian-solar-panels

I saw them, pretty jumbo!

I just checked and our panels were £122.50+VATea = £2,092.80incl for 16 x 490W so 27p/W including VAT, no chance of finding them at that now though, even if you can find any of the more efficient higher wattage panels in the UK.