One Year of Solar

In January we will have had solar panels for one year. In this article I will tell you what I learned and update it as the year closes.

The first lesson to learn is that there are two buckets APS uses, peak and non-peak. Any electricity generated in one bucket does not get transferred to the other.

The second lesson is that I misunderstood the APS bill. I thought I was going to generate way more than I needed in the peak bucket. To counterbalance this, I did the opposite of super-cooling once we started using our A/C in the spring. On Jul 23, I talked to APS and corrected my misunderstanding. This is why you see an increase of my bill starting in July.

I expect that next year will see a rise in the summer, but not nearly enough.

This graph makes sense if it is showing all the electricity I used, whether from the panels or from APS. If it does not, it seems that Sep is pretty high. 

This graph is from the Sunpower monitoring web app. The reason May is so much lower is my system was offline for 12 days because of a card that was meant for a smaller inverter. When I was generating a lot, it thought it was going to overload. This should be fixed in the next month or so. In Jul I missed 4 days, Aug 1 day, Sep 2 days.

I pay about $200 to lease the solar panels. In 2014, paid an average of $260 a month for electricity. I hope to at least break even, we will see.

Here is a spreadsheet where I have been keeping track of stats and conclusions based on data.