Worrying about January/ Winter Solar

gefnew

Yes can be very bad at times.

Mikeyboy01443

It will be my first winter too with solar... i get a lot of nay sayers saying to me 'oh you won't get much in winter' as if they are waiting for me to not do well in winter or whatever... oh well
At the moment i export on octopus agile and am just on the standard tariff as i use very little grid electricity, oncen the clocks change i will probably change to octopus go so i can charge my battery overnight and i doubt i will be exporting anything so i will just go on the standard SEG for export or whichever one i can use with Go.

thevilla

We spent 10 days in Tenerife for my 60th in December.   Thoroughly recommend that and as a bonus it made quite a dent in gas and leccy usage.  Didn't cover the expense of the extra alcohol consumption though.  

mickyduck55

Spies said:

December really is doggers for everyone isn't it. 

It was last year..... 

EcoScruples

The one thing that I got from all the info everyone kindly gave me was that if you have solar then the winter months are a bit less costly. There's not much more you can do apart from try to use as little energy as possible and play a few tunes with what you generate.

Some days in Jan/Dec look actually half decent and will maybe see me not import for a few days which will be very welcome.

Spies

This is a localish array to me but its more coastal so their generation might be slightly higher, seems like last Dec was about 10kw short of the previous ones.

https://pvoutput.org/summary.jsp?id=6273&sid=5007

@NoobSolar you could search out similar systems nearby and see what to expect? 

The_Green_Hornet

My first winter with solar was way back in 2010-11 when we experienced heavy snowfall and record low temperatures.

When your roof is covered in snow your panels don't generate much.

Mind you last December's generation was the worst I have recorded.

Coastalwatch

Checking back on figures for our 8.85 kWp with a 6k Inverter, last December was the worst yet at 166 kWh's so a little over 5 kWh's/day ave.  While the best Dec was 2019 @ 268 kWh's, so averaging 8.6 kWh's/day.

Expecting this year will be somewhere between.

Import for last Dec was 952 kWh's with 401 being on overnight cheap rate(although not so cheap this year!). We are all electric.

thevilla

Face it.  A sh** June is a lot more painful than a sh** December!    -200kwh vs. -50kwh.  Actually our best December was 78kwh so I ignore December.

allthatIcando

We have 20 panels facing S and E in South London. Last year we generated virtually nothing for about 2 weeks before and after the shortest day in mid December, but it was also very cloudy. By Feb we were starting to generate reasonable amounts again. Sorry I am not very techy so cannot show graphs etc.