It seems odd writing this post during load shedding and not having a worry in the world due to the investment late last year in setting up the solar installation. From the 12th December to he 31st December we managed to generate 585 Kw which is an average of 30Kw savings per day. The aim for tis month was to break the 1000 kw or 1 mega watt. We only managed to generate 861.2Kw which is getting close to the target.
The problem is the weather has not been favorable with rain for at least 2 weeks with heavy overcast conditions. This is the rainy season so this was expected and a good test to see where we are as a worse case scenario. The late sunsets have had no benefit as the sun was gone by 5pm. Today we have ad rain again and our system is not fully charged and has dropped to 85% even though sunset is due only at 7pm.
Electricity prices are due to increase by 12.7 % from the 1st April which will increase the cost of 1Kw to R3.38c. This is less than the proposed 36% that was originally requested by the SOE, but thankfully denied by NERSA the electricity watchdog.
861 Kw is still a saving of R2583 and will be costing R2910 in April so this is still decent. This is when I am sill down 1 battery so only having 75% storage of what was expected. The 1 Mw will be easily achieved once we are back to 100% storage within the next week. Generating 50Kw per day will be the figure that pays this investment off within 4 years besides all the increases that will happen from now until 2029 so this is a realistic time line and why this is so worthwhile if you can afford to go this route.
The target is to recoup the investment within 4 years and with a few tweaks here and there I do think this is possible. We are still playing around with the system and there are more solar panels that will be fitted along with one or two more batteries. This is actually quite fun to see how much power can be generated and to increase the savings each month. The extra panels will help to recharge the batterie that much faster but do believe we will still be short of being completely off the grid by only a few hours each day. Maybe the tweaks will make it happen ad why this is an ongoing project learning as we go.
This week we are having a switch that automatically turns off our solar system when the batteries reach 30%. I have been turning off the system when it reaches 40-50% so there are more savings coming next month just by adding this simple addition.
Some crazy figures which are only going to get bigger reducing the load on the SOE. This also means they are earning far less and why they want to increase the rates by 30% each year and penalise those who are not 100% reliant on their services.
The SOE this week targeted solar installations again calling them illegal if they are not registered. This obviously effects their revenue, but they can take a flying jump considering we are having load shedding again. They want us to be licensed paying a fee each month which is not happening. You cannot steal from the sun, but they will try make a buck out of anything. This does not make sense and if this is enforced I will be leaving the grid meaning I will have to invest more money to guarantee my independence.
I think I would need to spend another $10K to make this happen and was not something I was planning to do so soon. We shall just monitor what is taking place and get to a point that our monthly electricity bills are minimal and hopefully zero within the next month or two or days of zero costs at least.