Nothing much to bang home about with regard to Novembers solar figures besides they are consistent with the last few months. We may be heading to summer which means longer sunnier days but we are not seeing that yet. The last few weeks we have experienced hail and heavy rain fall which is expected as this is the rainy season and only from January will we start to really benefit with the solar.
The discharge is what I would like to rectify as in most other places around the world this would be going back to the grid. In my world we are currently tossing it away at a rate of around 10 kwh per day. That has negligible value except this is a double swing as this is roughly what I am importing each day and that has a cost. The R1000 or $60 dollars I am throwing away is like a $120 loss because my buy in should be close to zero. A 5kwh battery is around R15K so buying two would see me off the grid for 7-8 months of the year and recoup the investment in less than 3 years.
This month we were away for 10 days and had not really paid attention to the solar system notifications which tells you when you disconnect and reconnect to the grid. Over the last month there were 23 notifications with the last one coming through today. I had no idea the grid in our area went off late last night and was off for 12 hours. This would not be considered load shedding and was most likely storm damage due to lightning. The beauty of having solar is you have no idea what all the other residents in your area are experiencing as you remain unaffected.
What I find worrying is the 23 notifications meaning in the last month you left the grid 11 or 12 times before being reconnected. Some of these are minimal interruptions of a minute or two with others being a few hours. If we did not have solar which automatically kicks in before the grid interruption happens this would be disastrous for the household appliances. These could be outages or spikes and suspect the 1 minute interruptions were power surges or spikes.
Due to the unreliability of the power supply in SA insurance companies no longer cover you for your household appliances. This was a problem during load shedding as we managed to have our washing machine, tumble drier, microwave and a freezer all pack up within 8 weeks of each other. One you could understand and two you would say bad luck, but four would not be normal and has to have been down to power being switched on and off regularly. 90% of the appliances in the house now are rented which has me covered. Loadshedding may not be around currently, but the irregular supply through an ageing infrastructure is ongoing.
I have another 13 days before I do the annual report which should be kind of interesting to see how much has been saved. This was more about leading a normal life without power cuts so on that part we are winning. A quick calculation has me at around R27K or $1600 which would put me at around 7 years ROI with no increases which we know will happen. The plan was to recoup the investment between 4 and 5 years so I will dig deeper in 2 weeks and see if that is feasible or not.