First sunny month with new solar PV

With June being the first really sunny month of the year, I wanted to share my thoughts on how well my newly installed Solar PV setup performed.

Setup

I have two arrays on my house, consisting of eight plans on the main roof of the house, south facing and a smaller four panel array on my extension, facing the same direction. Lots of shading occurs due to neighbour’s chimneys, the house itself and the forest at the bottom of the garden. I have a 3.6kW inverter and a 5.8kWh battery (90% DoD). We have a Zappi charger for our EV and use an Eddi for hot water boosting.

Generation figures

I use Home Assistant to log more stuff, so here is the total energy distribution for June 2023.

My panels generated a total of 634kWh of electricity for the month. The month was mostly sunny with the odd cloudy days during the month.

Best saw 30.33kWh generated and worst day only 7.23kWh generated.

During the month I manged to exported almost 80kWh and imported 113kWh from the grid.

Summary

I’m pretty happy with the figures but I won’t have the full picture until I get the bill from Octopus, which will show how much of that 113kWh was split between peak and off-peak.

If I could consume every bit of electricity generated by the panels, they would have met our entire electrical demand for the month. However, this would require additional battery storage and a little more pro-activeness on our side to turn things on etc. to take advantage of the surplus.