First FIT reading submitted for payment to British Gas

With the panels now generating for over 3 months the time has come to submit our first reading to British Gas for our Feed in Tariff payments.

400 units @ 43.3p should be a cheque for £173 which isn't bad for what is probably the worst quarter of the year for electricity generation.

british gas fit payment

February beats all records

February has become a record breaking month and has now beaten records at both ends of the scale!

We have had the first day with over 10kWh generated (7th Feb) and also the first day with zero electricity generated (5th Feb)

February solar pv breaks all records

Solar Panels + Snow = No Electricity!

After the light dusting yesterday, we woke up today with a full covering of snow, approx 10cm. The panels are completely covered as is the Velux window restricting photos of them to being taken from the garden.

Solar panels covered in snow

Unsurprisingly Sunny Explorer is showing at total generation of 0 for the day which looks unlikely to change!

First 300kWh Reached Despite The Snow

Woke up this morning to a dusting of snow on the solar panels. The forecast is that the main fall of snow will be this evening but with some heavy clouds in the early morning I really wasn't expecting much from today especially after the very poor performance on the previous snow cloudy day.

Snow on the solar panels - Feb 2012

Despite the poor start to the day the sun came out and we generated nearly 5kWh taking our total generation through the 300kWh mark. Hopefully now the longer days are coming we will see more records broken very soon. The last 7 days has seen the highest peak generation at 2400W but we still haven't yet breached the 10kWh barrier for a day.

Solar Sunrise - Another Day, Far Better Results

Today started with a lovely sunrise. I managed to capture the sun rising reflected in the panels on the roof, one of the benefits of the Velux windows right in the middle of the array! After yesterday it was good to see some sun and get confirmation that the lack of generation was due to the extreme cloud cover rather than a fault in the solar PV system.

Solar Sunrise

Today was more back to normal with 7.7kWh generated and the latest generation time so far. The panels were still generating electricity at 16:45 compared to latest times of 16:30 in January and 15:50/15:55 in November/December.

You can see some basic comparisons of the generation stats here

http://solar.rainham-kent.co.uk/

The pages will be tidied up shortly with formatting and more complete info