And then there was ... SOLAR

So, one thing that the Dear Husband and I were adamant about, was to move towards a more sustainable lifestyle.  High on our list was a solar installation. Solar hot water was installed by the builder, but given our electricity bills are/were in the vicinity of $700/quarter we felt that any investment to reduce that bill, would be worthwhile.

We (ok, Dear Husband) researched inverters, panels and installers.  As luck would have it a dear friend used our front runner and provided invaluable feedback.  

Next step, the package - we were keen on the SMA inverters and phono panels, however apparently the SMAs are in short supply.  We were advised we'd be looking at waiting up until July at the very least before it was likely that some stock would be available in Australia.  Damn!

Based off of our installer's recommendation we had a further look at other inverters, including the Power-One Aurora.  Dear Husband who takes all things technical very seriously, insisted on researching it to make sure we weren't being told porkies (suspicious, much? Perhaps given recent experiences...).  Fortunately, Dear Husband was happy that the deal was still good and we proceeded with installation. 

A 5kW inverter is now attached to the meter box and 25 panels are affixed to the north-facing roof.  

Our 5Kw inverter

Phono panels, sucking up the sun juice ;-)

We've signed the contract to feed back to the grid and ran the system through its paces!  On went ovens, microwave, washing machine, dryer and computers along with the regular household items (TV, toaster, kettle etc) sitting on standby.  And, the meter box didn't tick over once!  We are producing more than we were using! WOOT!

Actually, by the calculations that have been done since installation, we'll produce in the vicinity of 16kWh on a normal Brisbane winter day.  In summer, that'll jump to 23kWh! That's ~7.5MWh per year!!

We've worked out that our $14K investment will be paid off in less than 5 years.  That's assuming that the power we generate will significantly reduce (hopefully wipe out) our electricity bills and return a slight income each year.

And much to our delight, just this weekend gone, it seems that we had a serviceman do *something* and we are now feeding back to the grid. YAY!

Suz x