Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams showed off some impressive demos which aimed to tackle the issues. My demo was reasonably simple and (I thought) quite effective. It displayed a satellite view of a street in…
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This is going to be a very unemotional, numbers-based blog post. I've rounded the figures to make it more readable. And I've put some pictures in to make it slightly more interesting. We have 5kWp of solar panels on our roof. The panels generate about 4,200kWh per year. Mostly in summer, but a decent amount in winter. Over a year, we export about 2,800kWh. That is what we sell back to the grid. We get paid an average of about £0.22 for every kWh we export. That's about £600 per year …
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I spoke, briefly, to BBC journalist Tom Singleton about our solar panels and how they're coping in the heat. The good news is that solar panels work when it is sunny (duh!) - but the bad news is that electronics are generally less efficient when it is hot. Here are a few examples. July 16th was a few days before the heatwave: .social-embed{all:unset;display:block;}.social-embed *…
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I fucking loved my first visit to #EMFcamp. After two years of lockdown, I was over-excited at the chance to be with all my friends in a field this year. I was over-excited about doing a talk about my beloved solar panels. I was over-excited about sleeping in a goddamned camper-van! I was even - sadly - excited at seeing my name broadcast on TELETEXT! Photograph © Skylar MacDonald 2022. All Rights Reserved. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. The universe, of course, had other …
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We've had solar panels on the roof of our London home for exactly two years. They've just tipped over the 8,000kWh mark. The first question people tend to ask is "how much do they cost?" And the answer is… "It depends." The costs we paid two years ago aren't going to be particularly relevant to you. We have a 3 storey house, so paid a bit more for scaffolding. Our electrics were in a decent state, so we didn't pay for a new consumer unit. I wanted Ethernet on the inverter so paid a bit more f…
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I blog about my solar panels - probably a bit too much! Recently, a reader asked me if I'd heard of Rowan Energy's solar payback scheme - so I took a look into it. Here's how it works: Rowan installer a "miner" next to your solar inverter (the big box that turns DC from solar panels into AC for home use). The "miner" monitors how much electricity you produce and reports it back via your home Internet connection. The readings are written onto a blockchain. Rowan pays you 10p per kWh your…
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We've had our solar panels for exactly a year. Our roof has an East/West aspect - and we have 2.5kW of panels on each side. Here's a typical graph showing how each side performs during the day. Edent's Solar Panels@Edent_Solar AutomatedEast facing solar panels 🆚 West facing solar panels. London, UK. pic.x.com/jbcd5kpgyj❤️ 1💬 0♻️ 021:30 - Tue 09 March 2021 What I find interesting is that the side facing away from the sun is much less affected by cloud cover than the side facing the sun. In thi…
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Our domestic solar panels have generated more electricity in a year than we have consumed. We installed 5kW of solar panels on our roof in 2020. Half are East-facing, half West-facing. Over a full year, they've generated 4,165kWh. By comparison, the average UK household uses about 3,800kWh of electricity per year. But working out exactly how much we've used is slightly trickier. We have a smart meter which reads our import and export. And a generation meter which shows how much we've…
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A few years ago, I took part in a local trial to install a solar battery in our home. The battery was excellent - and made a reasonable difference for our energy use. Sadly, last year, it died. It was prototype hardware, and these things happen. Moixa offered to replace it with an updated model - which was generous of them. While we were waiting for the new model to come in to stock, we moved house. Then COVID happened... Anyway, long-story-short, we now have a shiny new 2kWh battery…
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We've had our new solar panels for 6 months. Here's how they've performed over summer. 3,361 kWh Generated 2,445 kWh Exported ===== 916 kWh Consumed Despite working from home every day, using laptops, monitors, microwaving lunch, we only used about 5.5kWh of solar each day. About 72% of our summer generation was sold back to the grid. According to our electricity provider, in those 6 months, we imported 992kWh of electricity. So the solar panels reduced our energy bills by 50%. That…
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Back in 2014, I released a year's worth of solar generation data. I was enormously proud to recently discover that the data were cited in a couple of academic papers: Colantuono, Giuseppe & Kor, Ah-Lian & Pattinson, Colin & Gorse, Christopher PV with multiple storage as function of geolocation (2018) page: 217-232. Elsevier BV. Solar Energy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.03.020 Shukhobodskiy, Alexander Alexandrovich & Colantuono, Giuseppe RED WoLF: Combining a battery and thermal…
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Today is the longest daylight of the year. We had our new solar panels installed just after the vernal equinox - so now seems to be a good time to check in on how they're doing. (Who am I kidding - I look at their output several times per day!) Edent's Solar Panels@Edent_Solar AutomatedToday I generated 24.35kWh of solar electricity. pic.x.com/mrm4qn8uty❤️ 0💬 0♻️ 020:21 - Sat 20 June 2020 As of right now, they've generated 1.79 MegaWatt hours in total! You can view the live graph and you can…
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