Switched on—and addicted!

Yesterday lunchtime a chap in a yellow safety vest knocked at the door and said, “I’ve come to turn on your solar”.

I picked my jaw up off the floor and said “whaaaat!!! It was only installed on Wednesday”. I’d been expecting a week at least. Lucky for me he had a mate living nearby and saw that he could kill two birds with the one stone—visit the mate and turn on my panels. I could’ve hugged him.

I was out most of this morning and it was cloudy. But this afternoon has been sunny and I’ve been like a kid with a new toy. A bad case of Inverter Reading Syndrome. I’ve been dashing in and out every few minutes to read the inverter gauge. The installers told me this might happen, but that it would pass in a few days.

So here’s what’s happened today (bear with me—it will pass. I promise not to give daily updates!). Since the system was installed it’s generated a total of 15 kWh of energy. Today it generated 11 kWh. That’s pretty much my daily average usage, except that only half of my daily usage is used in the daytime and the other half at night to heat (off-peak) water. So I need to talk to my energy supplier and find out if I can switch to a tariff that will allow me to use the energy from the panels to heat water during the day. Then I’ll be really cooking with gas…er…the sun.

I’m still trying to register for the Energy Easy web portal where I can see all this information online, but the Smart Meter was only installed a fortnight ago, and the system apparently doesn’t know I’ve got it.

And of course, the meter has yet to be reconfigured to measure the excess I’m exporting to the grid. Till then, they’re getting it for free.