Tag Archives: Solar

/dev/random, EV

New Electricity Retailer

So after crunching some more numbers and reading the green peace green energy guide I decided to change electricity retailers. Based of my need for a high VFIT (see previous post )  it was a choice between AGL (current provider), Click Energy and Diamond Energy.

Power Saving Calculations
Power Saving Calculations

Ok so the savings it’s not completely fair on AGL $55 of that $70 saving is 100% green energy which I’m not longer buying.  As click doesn’t offer it on their solar plan. but i can buy green energy from the a environmental trust for 4.2c/kWh and it’s a tax deduction.

Click saved me the most money has no contracts over AGLs 3 year killer and Diamonds 1 year one, it was also rated by green peace as middle range green. I’ve decided to move to click energy I’ll officially switch at my next meter read.

What about Gas well it’s going to switched later when click supports it. from twitter today:

If I’ve convinced you to switch and you want to get $50 click has a mates rates referral program  drop me a message and we’ll go from there.

/dev/random, EV

Solar 1 year on

4 Comments

this time last year we had the solar installed well by this time it was well on the roof … this date last year we had the meter replaced and the solar turned on.

The statistics:

  • kWh Imported 4295.3
  • kWh Exported 3199.9
  • kWh generated according to the inverter 4936
  • Fit Collected at 8c kWh $255.99
  • kWh not purchased or sold 1736.1

I’m currently on a flat rate of 29.084 c/kWh (note my rate has gone up since solar was installed) minus 10% discount  plus 5.5  c /kWh for green energy = 31.94 c /kWh. So the amount not purchased or sold is what I saved by not buying 1736.1*31.94c = $554.51 + the money I got from Fit $255.99 so in a year it’s saved me ~$810.5.

Has the solar been a good investment no…the capital cost was around $8.5k so with the amount saved it’ll take 10 years to pay back. The main reason for this is that we export way too much and the fit is so low if we got paid what it costs us it would of saved us ~$1500 a year and only 5.5 years to pay back.  Do I care if it was a solid investment not really.

If we look at how green it is if we take imported – exported (1095 kWh)  that’s how much power I’ve used from other generators which for my area is black coal, but that has been offset by my green power money purchasing green power from wind and biogass. so does my house run emissions free when it comes to electricity according to an accountant yes, because every kWh of power I’ve used has been purchased from a green source  but maybe not according to an engineer.

Other interesting notes on the power bill:

average kWh used per day including solar from April to may 2013 before purchasing the EV was 12.1 kwh

average kWh used per day including solar from July 2013 to April 2014 post purchasing the EV is 16.5 kwh

so the effect of owning an EV on our power bills is about 4.4 kwh per day $1.40 increased cost. Note: this would also include seasonal cost extras like summertime air con and winter time heating so I won’t have a clear picture until we 1 year of EV ownership.

Linux

pvoutput.org updating

I’ve just got my new 3.27Kw sunpower solar system up and running and started output the results to pvoutput.org

http://www.pvoutput.org/intraday.jsp?id=20008

To upload I’m using the fronius easy card talking serial to a spare laptop ( will replace laptop with a raspi when i get a wireless card for it), because the sunpower inverter is a re-badged fronius i am using fslurp to do the serial commands

The only thing which needs to be changed is my device type is 0x97 Sunpower SPR-3501F-2, which is listed by fslurp as a unknown device.

I’m doing the actual upload to pvoutput using a sh script. fslurp2pvoutput-live.sh