I only managed to be patient enough to record just under 2 days data to share with you, but now i have some basic data i’ll leave it soak testing for a week.

To start to understand what this means you’ll need to know that the panel we have is a basic off the shelf  5w panel we purchased online and at present it is located behind glass in out bathroom as this room currently gets the most sun. While this rooms gets the most sun it does mean that the energy to the panel is filtered somewhat. As soon as i get a chance to weather proof the panel i’ll have it in the garden logging away.

So here is the quick read out from the panel.

What this means
We take a reading from the panel once a minute. At this rate the logger will store 22 days worth of data, however I would normally recommened once every 5 minutes giving just under 3 months data collection available (battery permitting).

What you can see here is that on both days there was a stead stream of energy being produced with the panel peaking out just under 20v 14:47 19 June. It appears that between 14:30 & 15:38 on that day the panel was collecting far more energy than any time over the previous day. So you can see we are getting sold data out of the unit, now we just need to do some research on some full size panels and work out some easy formulas to take our data & enable you to “size up” the information to work out what a solar array would generate.

To this end i’m going mate ALL the test data avaiable to you (below), in txt, csv & excel format so you can see exactly what is going on here.

Logging Software
At present the logger programing software is only available on Windows (which is irony as we are totally Mac in this house), so further down the line i’ll try and get a Mac version written, however once installed the software is very easy to use.

Simply plug the logger into the USB port and select STOP & Collect Data. This will stop the logger and pull the data off in a text format for you. This will then run the basic logger software to give you an instant read out you see above and then export to Excel if you wish.
This is all very easy.

To program the logger is just as easy. Simply click the Set up & you’re greeted with a screen asking you to set the logging interval and it’ll tell you how long you can log for. At this point simply click “OK” and then stick starts logging. Simply unplug from your computer and back into the panel enclosure, fit to your desired location and leave. That’s it, you’re logging

So as you can see the whole process “should” be dead simple and with a few clicks, an Excel spreadsheet and some forumla’s you’ll be able to work out if Solar is the way forward for you.

Download the data
Just right click and “Save as” (Windows) or “Download as” (Mac) these files to see the raw data out of the logger to have a play with.

I’ll be really interested to see what you do with the data you get out. Let me know what you get out of it and we’ll post it up here.

UPDATED : See the bottom of this post for an update and prototype pics

So back in THIS POST i was continuing to get stressed that it seemed amazing to me that there isn’t a device out there that will measure and log the energy generated on a small solar panel so i could do a solar survey without having to pay for a full sized kit. Investigating and installing alternative energy seems to be much harder than it needs to be, so it was time that we made it easier for everyone.

Montpillard.com has teamed up with Nick Farrell to make a solar logger and get it prototyped for testing and ultimately refined for availability to the alternative energy market.

The idea is simple, rather than wondering how much power you could generate, or wonder where the best part of the roof or garden to put your panels you’ll be able to take our logger and simple drop it in your desired location and leave it for 7, 10 or 30 days at a time. At the end of this period, take the memory module and plug it in to your home mac (or PC) and read the data in Excel or some other spreadsheet, it’ll be that simple.

That’s all the news right now, this week we should see some movement on the actual hardware and start to bring you pictures of what the raw “bread board” logger looks like before we start to refine the product.

Update : 9 June 09
Here are some very early pictures of our test hardware. The 1st image shows the readout from the panel over a time of 5 minutes. I’ll post more info as we get it, but I just wanted to share this with you

Base panel showing logged data.

Base panel and USB data drive

If you are interested in helping development, testing or becoming a partner please get in touch with us at HERE and we’ll get back to you ASAP with answers to your questions. At present this really is going to be alpha hardware but we have got to start somewhere.

What I’m looking for is a solar panel the size of an A4 piece of paper (21cm x 30cm ) with a data logger on the back. The kit should also power itself from the energy generated & charge a NICAD battery (for when it’s not generating power), record the time and the power that it is producing at any given moment then log this for a maximum of 7 days ( possibly 30 ) so that I can then plug a USB cable into it and get a raw CSV file out of it.

With this data it’ll then be really easy to move the panel to different area’s of the house to determine the best location for a panel plus given we know how much the average power output is for a panel this size, some simple maths will let us scale this up.

Here I’ve even got a diagram for you as inspiration but I’m under no illusion that I don’t have the smarts to build this so I’m assuming I’m missing something here and it’s harder than I think.

If you have something similar PLEASE contact me as this will lead onto a decent spend in solar panels for someone.

PS : Sorry if i sound like i’m a little ratty in this post but the truth is I am!
Looking to move to solar seems to be far harder than it needs to be and while I want to contribute to being part of the solution it seems it’s easier to be part of the problem. Below are the links to the other solar posts i have done and you’ll see the results ebb and flow from positive to negative.

Solar – Is it worth it?
Solar – Round IV
Solar Survey Part II

Solar Map 3.5Hrs ???

With a quoted sun index of 3.5 hours (seems low from our experience) Burgundy using the Sharp panels as quoted in THIS POST then on average we would generate 191kWh of electricity a month.

Given that electricity is charged per “unit” and one unit is almost equal to 1kWh the panels would ON AVERAGE return 191 units towards our monthly electricity bill.

If we price the cost of a unit VERY high at .10p ( 00.20$ or €00.12 ) then with a projected purchase and install cost of £6,000 the panels would take over 25 years to break even and by that time by everyone’s admission there will be far great panels out there.

UPDATE: After the utility companies in the UK just rocketed up their pricing the above figures are invalid. For that reason the maths needs to be refreshed to these :

• Currently 1unit (kWh) of electricity used including VAT is now £0.1853p

Here is my maths :

Average return x unit price = £19.10 – £35.39
Cost of install = £6,000 / £19.10 £35.39 = months to break even 314.12 169.54
Number of months 314.12 169.54 / 12 ( months in a year ) = 26.17 14.13 years to break even.

Now I am fully aware that some months the rate will be a lot higher and the unit rate is expected to rise but even then the figures aren’t stunning.

ORIGINAL FIGURE WORK LEFT HERE FOR REFERENCE : Lets say that the sun figures for Burgundy are wrong by just 1 hour a day and the unit of electricity doubles from .10p to .20p then the maths still looks like this :

At 4.5Hrs the EC8 will return 245kWh per month so :
Average return x unit price = £49
Cost of install = £6,000 / £49 = months to break even 122.45
Number of months 122.45 / 12 ( months in a year ) = 10.2 years to break even.

Ignore the below statement as it appears that i was NEVER paying .03p for my electricity ( that was gas ) . SORRY ALL
At these figures it “could” be worth it but given I’m currently paying .03p per unit from EDF that puts the pay-back currently at 87 years.

I need someone to point out the error in my calculations and quick before I choose the offset my carbon and electricity by planting some trees. Most disappointed today

The good news is that someone did point out the errors in my figures and I finally got my costs from my energy supplier things changed A LOT ! Feeling better today

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As many readers will know by know I’m struggling getting my head around the cost of solar power and it’s benefits and pay back mainly because for every plus there is a minus and it just seems like in some sort of research hamster wheel and I need to get off. So today on TreeHugger.com I spotted a little bit of welcome relief that actually floats my boat and has me mildly excited.

The Windspire is a new type of wind turbine from Mariah Power.

Firstly you’ll notice it’s a vertical turbine, requiring a lot less space in the rear garden, secondly the projected cost. Currently for the 1kW version you’re looking at around $6,000USD and for the 3kW unit you’re looking at around $10,000USD and this is tipped at producing enough energy to power your home.

The Mariah Power website is a little light on content and it does appear the style of the website falls over a lot but that could be down to the load it’s under after popping up on every green blog on the web. I’ll be keeping and eye on this as I must say I do like the idea of wind more than solar as it generates power 24hrs a day ( potentially ). Until there is more information out there here are a few bits to keep you going :

Company Name : Mariah Power
Web Address : http://www.mariahpower.com/
PDF Brochure : Link

I’m on the contact list for this so when more european wide information becomes available i’ll post it here. My only concern is that $10,000USD for the 3kW unit becomes €10,000 or even £10,000 and that puts it straight back into the problem bracket with solar.

Fingers crossed….

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For those that don’t know what “The Owl” is I’ll just have a very quick and simple recap.

It’s a device that reads the amount if electricity being drawn from your meter and with the information you enter during set-up ($ or £, cost per kWh, amount of CO2 per kWh produced) it’ll sit in your house frightening the life out of you by telling you how much your lights are costing you.

To do this you need to fit a transmitter to a cable coming out of your electricity meter. There are NO wires to cut into or clip you simply just put a sender around the wire and you are away.

Cost – £29.99 / £34.99
Supplier – http://www.electricity-monitor.com/

There are many other products on the market that do much more and much less but for me this was a great starting point and after 24Hrs of use I’m looking to upgrade to something with Mac/PC based reporting for greater information, but this is an excellent start.

Why we purchased “The Owl”
All you need to do is read the posts on my research in solar power to know that I’m back and forth on if it’s worth it. I needed a better idea of our electricity usage before i could make a more informed decision into alternative energy and if it’s worth the time and investment.

Initial Results
The unit has been installed for less than 24hrs but already it has scared the life out of me how much the plasma TV is using. I’ll be doing a full report this weekend of what applicance costs what to run and how we plan to reduce this. Come back soon.

Solar Array

I’m spending far to much time getting hung up on solar energy by the looks of it and 9 times out of 10 I end up being beaten back with the stick about its expense and time to recover investment and all your energy and motivation gets just sucked out of you HOWEVER there comes a little bit of information from time to time that goes a long way to helping pick you up again.

This gem comes from user mikebeavis over at the TreeHugger Forums.

” But wait! According to this page, France is encouraging the production of solar energy with a feed-in tariff. That means each kWh you produce is worth .30€ “

This is good news, well i mean GREAT news as this now means that every kWh that comes off the array is now worth more than double what it was producing on it’s own this drastically reducing the time for the array to repay itself to as little as 15 years.

The final thing to take into account is that most solar panels ( well ALL the ones i’m looking at ) come with a 25year warranty so that works out as a minimum of 10 years free power generation.

Solar Map

There are some great stats out there about sun time indexes etc etc to help you work this out and basically I know roughly that where we are gets 3.5 hours of sunlight a day and from that you can see that with the lowest price kit from MrSolar.com that the CE8 would generate an expected 1.91kWH of electricity over the month so we now need to know what our energy consumption would be. But a quick cost guide (in US$) looks something like this :

Based on 3.5Hrs of sun per day average
1.91kWh Kit cost $11,150 – CE8 Kit
2.86kWh Kit cost $16,000 – CE12 Kit
5.72kWh Kit cost $30,000 – CE24 Kit
8.58kWh Kit cost $59,500 – CE36 Kit

Now of course if you get more or less sun the kWh / $ figures would change if you are trying to work out per unit but the kit cost is the same. For instance the CE8 kit given 6Hrs of sunlight per day can produce 3.27kWH of energy so it really depends how much sun you get.

For this reason we’ll be looking to add something like the CE8 and use it to “top up” our electricity supply until we get a good idea of our energy consumption.

South Facing Roof @ 45Degrees

It’s worth noting that the 8/12/24/36 in the kit name is the number of panels supplied and with each panel coming in at 99.4cm x 164cm we’d be looking at an install of 4mx3, (approx) so you really will need to room and we hope that the grange has enough space to make it viable.

You can see the PDFs of the kit here :
Panel PDF , Inverter , AC Disconnect

This is was somewhat of a shout for help !

We are lucky enough to have a south facing roof @ 45-degrees to the sun on the “Grange” ( see below ) , and we need to do some sort of survey to see how much power we can generate and I’m not getting anywhere searching online.

What We Need
What I’m looking for is some sort of “solar logger” that is a fraction of a panel size i can place on the roof and leave it for a week so i can measure the sunlight over time and then “replay” that data so i can see on a certain day how much power it would have generated so i can then multiply that by the size of a panel and see what we would be getting.

Does anyone know of such an item or how we can do some logging and maths while we are not about ?

If you can help please use the mail icon at the top right to get in contact.

TIA, Lee