Residential Solar Project: Review of the First Year
We’ve officially been generating solar power for one year at our British Columbia home! There has been a lot to learn through this process. As we reflect on what it has been like to have solar panels on our house, I’m taking a look at the stats for how much energy we have been creating.
The Year in Numbers
Our solar panel installation was completed August 1, 2019 so I’m using the period of August to July each year for comparison purposes. See below for a summary of our results. I really like numbers and spreadsheets so feel free to skip past if you don’t!
The ‘Reduction in usage’ line is related to the changes we made to reduce our overall power usage, as shared here. Need a refresher on solar panel related terms like kWh (kilowatt hour)? Scroll back through this post from June!
Things That Went Well
We were apprehensive at the beginning of this project as it is a lot of cost upfront for, really, no guarantees on a return. However, the panels generated about as much as we expected and we’re quite pleased with the results!
The monitoring app that is used with our panels tracks CO2 reduction and we’re at 7 tons for the lifetime of our panels, which we find encouraging.
Expecting the Unexpected
We were excited to see how the panels would produce in June as it should have been the peak production for our year. However if you look at the graph below you can see that the production for June is quite a bit less than it should have been, going by monthly trends.
We had quite a cloudy month, including the actual day of the solstice. This was disappointing as the solstice, technically, should be the day where we generate the most power in one day due to the number of hours of sunlight and the angle of the sun. Hopefully we’ll have a sunny day next year!
We’re excited to see what the results are for the coming year. Stay tuned for more updates! Thinking about going solar yourself? Let us know your questions in the comments!
4 Comments
Ming Qian
Ooh, that’s interesting to note. I do not know of anyone using solar panels for their homes, and I certainly have never seen a breakdown of the energy generated in a table like that. Thanks for sharing, Krista. I wish you all the best, and I hope that your long-term investment pays off. It probably already has by reducing your carbon footprint! Thank you for your contributions towards slowing down climate change. 🙂
A Sustainably Simple Life
Thanks so much for your kind words! I hope we start to see them on houses more often! I had a hard time finding information like this on panels when we were looking into it so hope it helps someone else on their solar quest ?
Kelly Diane
This was a reallt interesting post to read. We have solar panels too and you can definitely notice which months are cloudy.
A Sustainably Simple Life
That’s amazing that you have solar panels too! We don’t meet many others that do 🙂