On Nov 1, 7:17*pm, Jules Richardson
wrote:
On Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:19:38 -0700, harry wrote:
On Nov 1, 5:31*am, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:24:19 -0700 (PDT), harry wrote:

I expect the price of panels will come down.

Why? The bottom has just been knocked out of the market.

There won't half be a rush before Christmas.

Except that actually getting a system installed before 12th Dec might
be quite tricky with all the accredited Solar PV firms fully booked
up...

I wonder what percentage of the national load it provides on a sunny
day?

4/5ths of bugger all. From the article linked to at the start of this
thread:

"As a result, figures from Ofgem show the amount of solar power
installed in the UK has increased dramatically, from 30 megawatts
(MW) before the subsidy started in 2010 to 321MW by October this
year."

321MW installed capacity with UK deamnd of around 40,000MW so about
0.8%.

and a capacity factor of around 10% so 0.08% overall

I have done 2747Kwh to date.

In what ? 6 months?

An average of 600 watts?

And that was the summer.

So an average of 300 watts over the year?

Less energy that we have used from oil for hot water and some space
heating lately all summer.

Its about 300 litres of oil innit?

Harry has saved the planet from burning four car tankfuls of diesel.-
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I haven't been running for a year so where do you get 300w from?

I wondered that; I thought they might have rounded up 2747 to 3000 and
then split it over 6 months, but that would still be a 500W not 600W
monthly average (and the assumption was 600W over the warmer months and 0
over the colder ones)

300W monthly average over a whole year might not be far wrong though I
suppose, if you're actually getting 500W during peak season - surely
that'll tail off dramatically during shorter days, cloudier (is that even
a word?) weather, snow on the panels etc.- Hide quoted text -

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The prediction is 3200Kwh/year but I think I am running above that, I
have only 500 to go. Obviously weather dependent.

I had a few days shutdown when they came back and fixed the roof and
when the power company changed the local tranformer.

The highest daily output was 29.6Kwh(May). the lowest so far was
0.6Kwh (rained all day)Last week. Atmospheric moisture is a key
factor,more so than angle of incidence even. Even a slight haze can
knock output back by 10%. A deep blue sky is the thing.
Also they are more efficient in cold weather. Probably ranges over
10% in our climate.
So, lots of factors. Even if you are at the top/bottom of a hill.

A key factor is that the peak output (beween 10.00 and 14.00)
coincides with peak demand.