Wednesday, April 15, 2009

34 kwh in six days














We generated more than 10.5 kwh on Sunday, which is charted above.  It's interesting to see that at least some power is generated over the course of 12 hours, even when the sun is very low, and on very rainy days, like Tuesday.


We generated 34 kwh in our first six days (below), running at a pace of 170 kwh per month; that seems to be in the right range, as PV Watts says I should generate 181 kwh in April (http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/codes_algs/PVWATTS/version1/US/Maryland/Baltimore.html).  (I may have to double-check the inputs there).  







Thursday, April 9, 2009

Power!

We're live!  Cheers to Pepco for checking out the system and replacing the meter in just a week after talking to me. 

Turned the system on last night and it was perfectly sunny for most of the day -- we generated 9.53kwh in total.  

The panels were generating as much as 1.5kw at around noon, and more than 1.4kwh average between 11 and 12, which is close to the built-in capacity of 1.61kw.  Sunpower provides a website with a cool chart showing hourly production and I'll try to figure out a way to get that up on this site.  It looks like we were producing power all the way from 7:00 am to after 6:00 pm.