Until yesterday we’d had no rain for about a month, and the panels looked really grubby. Saharan sand, bird droppings and sundry crap; quite how much they reduced generation I don’t know but it must be at least something.
We had lots of rain yesterday and they are now much cleaner. I’ve not seen 5,500W at 10 am before.
We had rain overnight too, but its been quite cloudy here (North Yorkshire) early morning so we’ve had limited Solar generation. It’s beginning to brighten up now though 
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We generated 1,062 kWh in May, which was 140 more than April. Our May bill, which includes the cost of charging the car, will be around -£105, which is nice. The weather for June looks a bit crap though, so it will be hard going to equal May I suspect. It’s only 15°C in the middle of the day and the heat pump has been working.
Sadly we fell just a little short of 1MW in May with 969.8kW 
. We exported almost all of that though for a £120 profit so a pretty good month!
We exported 1057. The generation was slightly higher than April. Account up £108 approximately.
Phil
Good article. My own generation slightly beats the reported 42% increase by a further 2% - Yay! More than makes up for the original entry in this article declaring my annual drop of 2024 by 10%
When we had our solar and heat pump installed just before Christmas I wasn’t really sure how it would all work out cost wise. We removed the gas and now use electricity for everything. We’ve also used it to charge the car, which has done about 2,800 miles on home charging.
The production for the first six months looks like this.
Our electricity consumption looks like this.
Our payment for export looks like this.
So overall we have spent just over £40 to run the house and car for six months. It will be interesting to see how the second half of the year pans out.
Well done, looking good!
I do often wonder what people do who have Solar panels, and dont look at graphs all the time. I suppose my wife comes under that description, but there must be installations where people haven’t got a clue, and probably dont get the best out of them, and consequently pay back time is a little longer. In fact the payback calculator should probably have a geek option, which when selected, reduces payback time.
Indeed, we have a smaller setup than yours I believe and no EV yet so on the higher off peak E7 tariff, but pleasantly surprised we are running a 10% operating profit for the first 6 months.. possibly helped by the unusually sunny April
Though you have gas or oil don’t you? We have electric for everything.
I guess it varies but how long did it take to get an export MPN ? We had panels installed two weeks ago - it’s great generating about four times as much as we use but will be even better when we get credit for the amount we’re exporting.
We had ours installed just before Christmas and were able to export on 13 February. You need to have the DNO letter before your electric supplier can action things, so I assume that’s underway. Southern Electric were really quick.
I also assume you are aware that if you applied for a G98 you’ll be limited to outputting 3.68kW. That’s fine to get you started and G98s are easy to get. But if you want to export more you need a G99, which is a bit more tortuous and requires the DNO to do a network survey to make sure the wires can handle a bigger output. We have a G99 and are able to export the full 6kW capacity of our inverter. If your area has old wiring you may not get G99 approval of course.
We had the G99 approved before the installation, and we are exporting lots. We’re just waiting for the installer to get a export MPN from the area DNO so that we can get paid for it, but all I’ve been told is that getting that can take ‘several weeks’.
We have oil for central hearing… no gas in our village..but yes that is why our overall consumption is less… our biggest load is the 10kW electric shower, followed by the cooker hobs.
It depends on your region and area. Our overhead village supply in East Anglia took about 3 working days to get the G99 (incorporating a 5kW inverter) certified from the DNO, our installer directly managed the process. We went directly with a G99. Getting our electricity supply company, in our case, Octapus, to complete the process in conjunction with the DNO of registering our export meter against our G99 took about 3 weeks… usefully all the units we had exported into the grid whilst we were waiting for the process to complete did get back paid to us… which I wasn’t expecting.
Thanks. I’ve followed up with the installer (Good Energy) and they say it’s currently taking about six weeks.
usefully all the units we had exported into the grid whilst we were waiting for the process to complete did get back paid to us… which I wasn’t expecting
That’s interesting, I’m not expecting that either but we’ll wait and see !
Another milestone in our eco journey: as of 9 July income from export balances expenditure on import. It’s nice to see.
Currently sitting at 632.9 kWh more export (@16.5p/kWh) than import (@6.7p/kWh) this year. But then I don’t have an EV (Kia Rio and BMW M40d) or a heat pump (LPG ~£1,000 pa), so not a fair comparison. I am unlikely to be energy cost neutral by year end.
I’ve been watching the Octopus app like a hawk recently. Not so much to get excited about the savings being generated as because they have regularly been failing to show an export figure. Sometimes the app shows a zero export figure for a whole day when I know the sun was shining. Twice I’ve contacted Octopus and they have added in figures for those days. If there was data missing for just part of the day I’d be none the wiser and might be missing out on credits.
