Solar panels and fun with graphs!

Got solar panels last year, but only got around to looking at my inverter's analytics properly over the Christmas / New Year break. And now I'm addicted.

We can't afford a home battery (or at least I can't justify the expense given that a battery won't pay for itself in warranty period). See Solar Quotes' article on Should You Buy Solar Batteries.

So the next best thing is looking at our power usage and trying to adjust to make the most of solar panel generation during the day based on the inverter's analytics.

Yesterday's graph is just beautiful.

 
Me working from home with reverse cycle air-conditioning running. Despite this, we only started consuming energy from the grid around 6:15pm last night, when air-conditioning combined with cooking outstripped solar panel generation.

Note we had plenty of excess solar generation during the day to run the washing machine, coffee machines etc, had we needed to. We have mostly new or new-ish appliances, and LED lighting. 

Seeing the overnight 'heartbeat' that I assume comes from the fridge compressor has prompted us to start looking for good deals on more energy efficient fridges.

2 responses
What sort of feedin tariff have you been able to get or selling the orange overproduction? For a long time we were getting 20c/kwh but now getting 10c for the first 14kwh/day average and 5c for anything over that. For us that meant anything we were using was effectively 1/2 price as we could get a reasonable price for selling it. Less so now.
We are only getting 5c / kwh from AGL. Hence the emphasis on making the most of solar generation.