December Results - Nearly Two Years

Well here we are after a very wet and windy Wellington in December.

Even with the poor month we have still achieved a better PV run for the month with 335.13 kwhr's and 2.923 Mwhr's for the calendar year.

 As you can see it was very patchy month with a lot of days with very limited sun and hence little consistency.

However the run for the month was still better than last year which was also a very poor month.

The next blog will give us two years of results and will lead into the annual report. So watch this space.

The core temperature for the house has now reached 28 degrees and I'm expecting to see this get to 35 by the end of summer.

November 2013

November has proven to be a damp month with less sunshine than last year. We struggled to get an increase in power generated during the month with the best day being right at the start with just over 15 kwhr's on the 2nd.

The amount of PV power generated at 304 kwhrs for the month is less than the 342 kwhrs last year, however we are still above the total for the year.

October Results

Well October turned out to be a very wet and windy month and hence less power was generated from the PV system than last year. However we are well ahead of last years total run.

The DSHH system continues to perform really well with the core temperature now up to 25 degrees and just about ready to turn of winter mode and put all of the heat into the core.

The yield for the month from the PV shows a steady increase on the fine days with 15kWh being generated on the 27th but with over 12 days with less than 5kWh.

The power for the month was 270.5 kWh which is slightly less than last year, however the good start in summer still means we are on track to exceed last eyars run. The year to date is 2.312MWh and since inception 4.916MWh.

The core temperature has now risen to 25 degrees, and this is 5 degrees higher than this time last year. We will be turning the system to summer in the next two weeks and then all heat will go direct to the core so we should see a rapid rise into the mid 30 degrees by March.

September Results

Another month goes by and the days get longer and the sun starts to get more hours in the sky.

In September we had a very wet month and as a result we only achieved 221.5kWh compared with last year when we had 263kWh.

Year to date we are well ahead of last year with 2.0148 MWh and 4.654MWh since turn on.

The Digital Self Heating Home system continues to perform well with the core now starting to slowly climb. as of end of September the core is up to 23 degrees and I expect by the end of this summer should be in the high 30's.

The garden is doing well and here is a couple of photo's of the front garden, the Chatham Island Forget-me-nots and the tulips.

August Results

We are now past the winter solstice and the results are again trending upwards as expected.

We have now upgraded our system so that the system can continue to operate in a power cut and hence the system is now fully redundant for power during daylight hours.

The results for August are as expected with nearly 10kWh mid month but overall an updward trend compared with previous months:

I'm expecting to see a steady climb in the next few months as we get longer days and a better angle to the sun.

July Results

Well we are now slowly climbing out of winter and getting a few sunny and longer days.
This last month has seen 144.57KwHr's produced slightly higher than June with 105.62KwHr's and with a peak on the 30th of 8.79KwHr's

Here is July's power run for the month.

We are now more than half way through the year and the total power generated each month compared with last year is displayed below. We have now generated 1.6MwHr's this year and over 4.2MwHr's since turn on.

During the month we have also had installed an extra solar panel specifically to run the DSHH water pumps in a power outage. The 250w panel is enough to run the two small pumps that move the hot water around. This now means that in a power outage we have full cover as long as the sun is out, but recognising that this is when the water also gets heated.

During the recent major power outage which was also during a very cold southerly the house was off the grid for over 24 hours/ There was no sun during the outage and thus the house slowly cooled from 22 degrees to 18 degrees so never got cold. A good test for the thermal seal of the house. As a result of the drop in temperature we are replacing our front door as most of the heat loss was due to poor sealing of the standard door against the uPVC surround. We are now installing a uPVC door which will provide a full thermal seal (should have done this originally!!).

May 2013 Results

Well the pundits got the weather right during May with a lot more rain than previous years and hence little sun to benefit from.

The house continues to perform as expected albeit that the core temperature has now reduced to 23 degrees at month end. 

We have now started the install of the self reliant power system for the DSHH system with an additional 280 watt panel being mounted on the roof just to power the pumps and the back up system in a power outage. This will protect the water system from reaching over 100 degrees and turning to steam.

The results for May are as follows.

The month was very patchy with no good days and with the top power run being less than 10kwhr's.
June is likely to be similar and then we start the climb back up to the peaks.