Production for the year.

The period of time that we were away shows clearly as a higher percentage on this yearly percent from solar chart.  This is normally a period of low production due to cloudy conditions and yet we were consistently producing up near the 60 percent level.  The period that the house was in low energy mode was July through August.

Note:  July through August near right side of chart.

Low energy mode

Our house is currently in low energy consumption mode. It will be interesting to analyze the data after we switch back to normal mode.

Good Days

Yesterday our system generated 60 percent of our energy but today the clouds have moved in.  The months of March and April are typically our best months.  The sky is clear and the days are getting longer.  Production peaks in April or May and then declines as the rainy season begins.  We need to work on conservation and plan to eventually replace our refrigerators with more efficient ones.  The refrigerators are our biggest consumers after air conditioning and heating.  With some effort it is possible to retrofit an old house like ours into a zero energy home.  If we replaced our two refrigerators we would come close. 

Reboot

My neighbor rebooted my little netbook server yesterday.  He said that it looked as though the modem in my house had lost its Internet connection.  I logged on via VNC and it seemed fine.  It might be that my ISP does not like continuous connections longer than a certain time or that the modem just froze as sometimes they do.

Server Problem

My little netbook that acts as my server has apparently stalled or frozen.  I have asked my neighbor to reboot it if he finds time.  This is the shortest day of the year so production should gradually start improving from now on. 

Low Energy Mode

House is in low energy mode while we are away but our area has had bad weather.  Clouds and storms.  Percentages will be inaccurate until next week.

Pool Pump Timer Error

The timer tabs on the pool pump clock loosened yesterday allowing the pump to run for several hours longer than normal before I noticed it.  The pump being one of our greatest users of electricity is normal restricted to four hours maximum in the winter.  We also ran our irrigation pump during the previous 24 hour period.  But, doing all of that and with very overcast skies we managed to generate 25 percent of our energy from solar.  The temperatures were around 80 F and the air conditioning did run some but not nearly as much as in the summer.