A Month Later

It’s been a 1.5 months since my solar generation began and I’ve now have passed the 1Mw point.   I’ve received my HST number and have notified the microFIT program about my new number,  as a contract change notice (yes paperwork) and have also alerted the LDC.  I am told I can expect my first payment sometime in November or December depending upon where I landed in their payment cycle.  We shall see.

I have set up an evaluation spreadsheet so that I will have a historical record of power produced and when.  The Solaredge inverter keeps the data for 20 days in its system so I dump it every 15 days as a CSV file and import it into Filemaker pro for analysis.  The data provided is pretty extensive.  I have daily output data as well as 24 hour data at 15 minute intervals for the system.  I haven’t seen anything that provides individual data for each panel which would be interesting but there is a limit I guess, with to much information.  All I want to know is if it is working well relative to the previous years/months output. 

I have been monitoring my system against a couple of other systems in my relative area.  I think this is important because this info provides some info that one can you to gauge how well the system is doing in terms of efficiency.  Mine is working as I expected.

Aside from that, there really isn’t much to do…in fact it becomes quite boring after a while.  Basically the panel just sit on the roof, the inverters just chugs along and they do their work.  I can see myself keeping up with the info for a year or 2 to get year over year data but after that….who knows.  

There is a website that allows you to put your data online so others around the world can look at it.  It is useful only if there are other installations listed in your particular area, which could be the case.  It is definitely worth the visit:

http://pvoutput.org/

But I do have a problem.  One of my panels has stopped producing electricity and is registering 0 Watts.  I would assume that the Optimizer has failed.  I am not very worried about this because it is a west facing panel and we are in October.  Therefore the amount of power this panel will be producing in the next few months will be relatively small so that loss of income will not be much.  I will wait until spring to change it as I might have more Optimizer failures over the winter and would rather have the installer come once  and fix them all at the same time.  Although disappointing, I am not surprised and have accounted for this possibility as the risk of going with a DC/DC optimizer or a microinverter setup.  In this case you have more points of potential failure as Steve, my installer warned me prior to the install.  Notwithstanding, I still feel with my particular situation the Solaredge approach is the best approach for me.