Solar Power

Last week my solar panels were installed. I ended up getting 5.27kW of panels paired to a 4kW inverter. Where I live I can only export a maximum of 5kW to the grid and as the kids are at school and my wife and I are at work most days, we don't have a huge amount of power usage during the day. I would end up making more power then I could export so the return on the investment would be there to have a larger system with a larger inverter, the next size up was 8kW.
I'm glad that I went the way I did, using tilt stands instead of just lying the panels flat on the roof. I'm already maxing out the inverter for an hour or so in the middle of each day where if the panels were flat, I wouldn't be generating as much power. Yes the tilt frames cost more, but I think it will be worth it in the long run and either way, what's done is done so there is no point worrying about it any longer.

On Tuesday I dropped my wife at work and then took the kids to the dentist, you can see in the graph when I came home and we turned the heater back on. This was the day before the solar system got installed. 
Our electricity provider had already configured us in advance so we were up and running the day the solar system was installed. 

On Thursday I was home with the kids all day and you can see where the solar system started producing power and we weren't using any from the grid. I'm pretty impressed the the electricity provider has all this information available on their website. It takes a couple of days for it to be available but to be able to see an hour by hour break down of your consumption and your generation is pretty cool. The graphs are showing the cost, so the export to the grid looks small as they don't pay very much. I managed to get up to 3kWh export for a bit on Thursday so the system works and I'm very happy with the results.
I'm looking forward to seeing the difference between summer and winter, I'm not sure if I'll get into credit with such a low feed in tariff but I'm hoping to at least be almost neutral for summer.

Bomber
One thing ticked off the unofficial list at last.