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If you want to know what I'm on about in the shortest time then please read the introductory first post and my current action plan. Comments are very welcome. And if you like this blog, please tell a friend. Thanks!

Saturday, 18 October 2008

Stats Update

In the past 45 days...
Our solar panels have produced 187kWh of electricity (4.16/day).
87kWh of that has been exported to the grid (1.93/day), while 100kWh has been used immediately in our home (2.22/day).
We have consumed an additional 279kWh from the grid (6.2/day).
Total consumption is therefore 279+100=379kWh (8.42/day).
We have also used the electric booster for our hot water occasionally: 10.9kWh total (0.24/day).

Scaled up to 3 months, our bill (should AGL ever get around to sending us one) would look like this...
Tariff 11: 558kWh @ 16.29c = $90.90
Tariff 33: 22kWh @ 9.78c = $2.16
Solar export tariff: 174kWh @ 44c = $76.56 credit
Total: $16.50

Well, except that there's a monthly service fee of $6.26 for tariff 11 and the minimum monthly cost on tariff 33 is $4.36. So that brings it up to $37.48. I'd actually save $9.50 per bill if I switched my hot water booster to tariff 11... but there's a $50 charge for the swapover, which means a 15 month payback time.

Bottom line: at this point in time our 1kW array is producing just under half of our home's total energy needs, though only about half of that is produced when we actually need it. Thanks to the government's feed-in tariff, that misalignment of supply and demand has a very positive impact on our electricity bills. The energy we export is valued at 80% of the energy we import. The additional amount we produce and consume locally is effectively worth another $33 or so that doesn't appear on the bill.

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