No Other Words: Last Month Was Grim! February Solar Review

I take a look at my solar generation for February 2024. How much did I have to import and how much did it cost and how much did I save.

Hello welcome back to the channel and we’re into March so it’s St David’s day when I’m filming this um and it’s time to look back at February at my solar generation my energy usage my money savings my money in from seg and all that sort of information so before I

Start that first of all thank you to everybody who subscribed to the channel if you’re watching this and you haven’t subscribed yet please hit the Subscribe button it does help the channel out um basically puts it in front of more people and more people can get this information and yeah it’s just generally

Good for the community if you canit um subscribe to people’s um videos or channels um February was a bit of quiet month as far as the channel is concerned I only released the video right at the very beginning of February review in January um that’s for a number of

Reasons first of all um been quite busy with things like wedding dances and the Tango stuff um I had this flu thing that was been going around um which took me out for about a week and also with my other job as a university lecturer I’ve

Been having to do a lot of work preparing for some lectures that are com in up on that however that does mean that in March I am going to be making some videos that relate to the content in those lectures that I’ll be putting out so um I’m currently lecturing on

Three courses um one is on solar energy and and the different emerging Technologies is one of the lectures that have come out I’m going to be given next Tuesday so this revolves around things like prosite solar cells desensitized solar cells uh quantum dot solar cells um so what I’ll be doing with the

Channel this month is making some short videos explaining those to the general audience so they won’t be specific to scientist it will be sort of a general background just so you get an idea of what is happening with solar panels in the industry um another lecture I’m going to be given on that

Course is about the social and economic impact of solar panels so I’ll probably condense some of that down into a video that is uh suitable for YouTube as well anyway let’s go and have a look back at my solar generation in uh February and I’m going to start off this video with

This graph so this is the graph of my yearly of My Generation Um for each month and compar in the different years so the orange bars are for 2023 for each month and as you can see I’ve got a four years worth of data there the

Darker blue uh is for 2022 where we only had the panels at the end of August and therefore you got full months data for September October uh November and December and the pale gray is for 2024 and the reason I’m starting with this fe uh this graph is because it

Really sums up what February was like for solar production here in Swansea um as you can see last year we generated about 270 kwatt hours in February this year we are significantly less so there’s a couple of reasons for that first of all last year was the driest

February um on record according to One news source I read um and this was one of the wetest februaries in um on record so if we actually go to the graph of my generation on a day-to-day basis in February 2024 uh you can see what I generally mean so there was

Only what uh 1 2 3 4 five 67 days out of 29 where we produced over 10 kilowatt hours and if you look at the days where we producing less than 5 kilowatt hours there are a lot of them and there’s also long periods where we had multiple days where we were

Generating less than 2 kilowatt hours you can see that between the uh second and the 6th of February so it’s been very cloudy here um I was speaking into some apparment of some I tutor so that’s another reason why I didn’t make my videos I was doing a lot of private

Tutoring of physics and math as well um that there’s only been 3 days in February where it didn’t rain here in Swansea so yeah there was been very little generation so the best day for generation was back on the 206 I think that is um where we had

Generated 20 kilowatt hours in one day but other days we were gener about 1 kwatt hours so that’s been the maximum and minimum which means in total in February we only generated 59.3 kwatt hours so that’s significantly less than last year was 110 Kow hours less than last

Year and it was also less than January where we generated 195 kilowatt hours so if we now go to the graph where we look at the usage of my solar Powers so this graph shows both my usage and my uh input so the real input this is money that I’ve

Um measured off my smart meter um is in red the um battery dis um so the self use let’s do that next which is the green so this is energy we’ve produced on the roof and we’re using in real time um so you can see that most days there’s

A small amount of green um yellow is the battery discharge so this is energy we’ve generated and we’ve stored in our 5 KW hour uh Pure Drive battery um and then used throughout the day um we don’t charge yet the battery from the grid we’re not on a tar if that

Allows that yet or make it uh or would make any difference if we did do it as far as Finance is concerned um a little bit more than that later um so yeah there um there was some discharge on most days but still not a huge amount and the blue is the export

So you can see how few days we were exporting back to the Grid on right so let’s have a put this into some perspective so this is a graph of our energy use month for month and it’s split into uh what we’ve imported from the grid in red and the electricity that

We’ve generated ourself in blue that we’ve used so you can see in February we used about 1977 kwatt hours of which 112 just under 112 was generated ourself and 8 uh 5.88 KW hours we had to import from the grid so as I say that was more than in January where we only

Had to import 76 KW hours so in terms of uh export what we exported would have been the difference between that 111 and the uh 160 that we generated so that’s about roughly 50 kwatt hours we sent back to the grid and those were from those days where it was particularly sunning it

Would been far better if we had a really big battery we could have saved it and used uh later but we haven’t got that though I am looking into to get another battery because in the UK there has been the vat has been removed on battery in battery only installations so that’s now

Becoming more attractive and also the prices of batteries has dropped so uh I’m also looking into that as well so let’s see how that looks in terms of money so that’s what this graph shows so the red is the import and we spent £6 uh 82 on import which I think is one

Of the most we’ve ever spent on electricity import um we spent slightly more than that we spent £17 27 in December last year and uh yeah that’s the worst month we’ve had so it’s the second worst um month since having our solar panels we’ve had for energy import um so that figure is

Calculated from my uh British gas rate which is roughly about 19p per kilowatt hour of input um that tar does finish at the end of this month so this month I am going to be switching and I think I will be going for octopus energy so if you

Have got this far for the video and you’re an octopus Energy customer and you have a referral code if you want to ping me that uh referral code down in the uh comments below whoever is the first one to comment it that’s the one I

Will be using if I go with octopus uh energy right uh then we’ve got the green which is our money saves this is money that we would have been paying to British gas if we didn’t have the solar panels so that’s £21.92 um and finally uh I should say that none

Of these figures include the stand in charge and then finally we’ve got the £787 which is our SE payment which is also with British gas which is paying um 15p per kilowatt hour so in total that means that this month we have been uh 43.4 2% reliant on the grid which again

Is our second highest uh Reliance on the grid since we’ve had the solar panels um and adding that £21.92 to the £7 87 comes to £29 and uh 7 £29 79 so that’s our effective our payback on on the solar panels uh which means for 2024 so

Far um we have made a save in of uh £49 57 uh we have made £657 from seg so that totals uh £66 and3 in um effectively payback off our um initial cost of our solar panels which was about £8,500 back in 2020 2 and our money on import so far has been

£31 73 which is nearly half um as U so in put that a different way in uh 2023 we spent about £69 in total on import so we’re nearly halfway there and we’re only two months into the year so let’s hope that through uh March we actually have some sun um mostly

Because I’d actually like to go out and do some cycling and also I’d also like to go and do some stuff in the garden so final graph for today this is sort of the money um payback on each um month so again same colors as the very first

Graph I’ve shown in here this um video so you can see uh last year we made just under £40 payback in uh February so this is the sum of money saved and the S this month has been significantly lower however in in uh January last year uh or

January this year we made slightly more money so it’s almost offset so it’s almost equaling out year on year which I suppose is the whole point of averages anyway uh thank you for um watching this video as say if you haven’t subscribed please do and I’ll see you in another video very soon