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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Thanks again for all the information!
Yeah, going off grid is a whole philosophical idea in itself, way smarter to share with the grid if you're not in some very specific situation IMO.
I always thought that those calculations about solar was a bit bogus, like you extrapolate the earnings today over say 12 years to pay off an installation, of course it will get cheaper in the future and as more people have solar, revenu goes down too. Seems you solidify that idea!
Today though it starts to be almost a criminally good investment... Living in an appartment I seriously think I might get one of those balcony panels this year, just gotta check out how it actually works when ju inject that into the system. We redid all the electricity so we have separate lines for about everything, will the sun powered line hop over to another one (they are after all all tied together at the central input) and how many amps can you allow to flow "backwards" like that and so on.
This is why you probably need a new meter, at least that was the situation for us. If we didn't get a new meter, we would only be able to use one line, and the surplus would go to the grid. Even if we used power on the other lines. So definitely ask an electrician or you power company about this.
They actually forgot to tell us that, so after some very confusing analyzing of what the fuck was wrong, I complained that the system didn't work, most of our generated power was sold, and then we had to pay to sort of buy it back!!
This was all down to the meter not being replaced for one that was meant for handling local production properly. We basically lost 3 months of production on that account. After we got the new meter, it worked perfectly, and production is as advertised, and I was very happy to see that production in winter was almost exactly as I'd calculated: 😎 Although obviously you can't calculate the number of sunny days in advance.
NB! here the new meter is subsidized so we got it at a fixed low price of €200 including installation.
Something that surprised me, was that in the summer, production is still reasonably good even on days where the sky is completely overclouded, as long as the clouds are white, enough light penetrates so we can still achieve almost half the full capacity.
Another fun story IMO, is that we switched electricity supplier February last year, and they work with advance payments, and since we were new customers, we got a bill for 3 months of normal use. We just received the "bill" for 2nd quarter, with negative payment amount, because there is still money left from our advance payment! 😋 AND that is without sales, which is a separate account, but is only about €15 per month on average. (for selling 7844 kWh for the year 2024) So about 2 cent per kWh on average.