Debbie and I built our farm last year to be as eco-friendly as we could afford. We installed ground source heating, take water from our own spring and generate electricity from solar panels on our alpaca shed roof. We didn't do this because we're green crusaders or anything, and we use petrol and diesel like most other people (my lovely quad and tractor have seats made to measure my bum precisely!).
Today's blog is about the sunshine we have (or have not) been having and how our solar panels have been performing (much better than the windmill that crashed near us a few weeks ago anyway!). Now every week I take my readings and as is customary with men and numbers, I put them on a spreadsheet and create a little graph, and here it is:
The bars along the bottom are the week ending dates, starting back in December when the panels were commissioned. The numbers up the side are the number of Kilowatts (KW) of electricity that the panels generate each week. To put this in context, Offgem, the energy regulator estimates the average household uses 63 KW of electricity each week or 96 KW if the household uses Economy 7 (cheap overnight electricity).
The good news is that in the 30 weeks the solar panels have been working, they have produced on average 154 KW per week, enough to power 2.5 typical households!
How about the week ended 27 May when the panels generated 442 KW, that was enough to power 7 typical households!!!
The readings also give a good guide as to how sunny it has or hasn't been this year, and who would have thought that you should book your summer holidays in the last week of March??!!
Paul
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