01 September 2011

One Year Anniversary - how did the system perform?

There are many ways to answer the question "How did it go? Was it worth it?". Our system was online one year as of 4pm 24 August. Our system is a 4.9 kW panel array and 5.1 kW string inverter. We are located on Farley Ave, Guelph and our roof faces south east, 40 deg slope. We have 20 SolarWorld panels that are 240 watts (two strings of 10 panels into the inverter). I have downloaded the data from the inverter data logger and can now say the following:
  • Total annual output was 5509 kWhr
  • $4418 gross revenue (HST not included)
  • Our loan payments (2nd mortgage on the house so we are only paying 2.6% interest) have been $3,921 which started being paid July 2010
  • Total payout from Guelph Hydro was $2,942, which means we should be getting a nice cheque any day now 
  • Total output per kW of installed capacity is 1124.2kWhr/kW capacity
I have not had time to to do much more analysis on the data, but I shall over September. For example, I'd be interested to know what type of production does the system acheive during the longer sunny days, but the hotter temperatures. 
I also want to discuss my experience with claiming back the HST, and what you have to do when you collect the HST on behalf of Revenue Canada (hint - cheque book). I would also like to compare the annual production with what I modelled to see how RETSCREEN matched our system. 
Tonight I went to a solar coop meeting here in Guelph at Harcourt Church. It had about 30 people attend and they talked about the two proposed solar coop projects. I'll talk about those soon too. But for now, I just wanted to get the annual results out.