Often I read that people are disappointed with the output from their system, or question if they actually get the quoted systems power rating.
There are many things that will determine the peak and total output from your system. Before we look at those factors lets take a quick look at what our system is achieving for us. As I mentioned in our February update I have installed Pro Control software on my computer, and it enables us to log the systems output. Fortunately I work from home so my computer is on most days all day so I can get a fairly accurate picture of our systems output. Additionally I have read and recorded both the power meter and the grid connect inverter's since the system was installed, so I have a good handle on out energy consumption. Our energy consumption and situation is different to most people's in Australia. First we live on a small farm and run a web and graphic design business·from there. This means we have a substantial amount of power consumed in the generation of our income. Being a farm and being totally water self sufficient we also use power to transfer water for both us and our livestock and to provide water pressure.
First lets look at the peak power out for the last week. Our system is a 1.53KW system, 9 x·170W panels in a single string feeding a 2.2KW inverter.· You can see that on·4 days the system exceeded the quoted maximum output since the software was installed. 
Next let's look at some daily output graphs. The first was a clear warm day, 30 degrees C with no cloud so the shape of the curve is fairly smooth, but with some small ripples. Note too though, it did not reach the rated system output. We will look at the possible reasons later in the article, one of which is panel temperature.
This second graph was on a cloudy day with light showers. You can see when the sun came from behind the cloud the panels were cool and the output peaks then drops back down. On this day the peak output was 1785Watts, note this is not the highest reading to date. We have observed up to 1924Watts peak to date.
We have also uploaded all our past data to a web site called PVOutput. You can see our history here. If you have a solar system please join in.
Next lets look at our power output per day. The maximum we have produced in a single day was on the 1st of January. 12 KW Hours. The system was rated for our location at around an average of 7.5 KW Hours per day. Now if we look at our power bill for the last 3 months lets see how we did. First let's point out an error on the online bill. They have our average daily usage listed as 24.04 KWh. In Reality it was 17.51KWh. Why the difference? They counted the energy we produced ald sold to them as part of the consumption. I have written to them outlining the error. So what did we achieve, we generated 512.22KWh up until the 31st of Jan then another 180.78KWh up until the 24th of Feb a total of 693KWh or 7.53KWh.. Note too the 2 decimal places on their reading. The meter itself only displays whole numbers so they must be now reading the meter remotely or electronically. So we won't at this stage be meeting the anticipated average of 7.5KWh a day of generation. Once we understand all the variables we will look at maximising our output.
Continued in Part 2
