I have posted all my past musings so now I'm posting in real time. We've had the system for a few days and I've been logging temperatures whenever the solar turns on. It ran a lot the first few days, but as the water in the tank gets warmer and the system reaches an equilibrium, it turns on less frequently. Particularly on cloudy days.(Duh.)
One nice surprise is that on sunny days, the system is kicking in way earlier than I expected. There have been days where it turns on as early as 8:15. The water at the bottom of the tank is 80 degrees, but the panel, in partial sun, is warmer.
On sunny days, it operates more or less continuously from 8:30 until 3:00 PM. The highest temperature of water leaving the tank was 107, which means the collector temperature was 115. The high that day was 76 and there were periods of clouds. According to the Wayne's Solar sales rep, the collector will reach 140 (which is the recommended max) once the weather warms up and the sun is higher in the sky.
Today is supposed to be cloudy all day so we probably won't get much activity.
Even with the cloudy days, we haven't run out of hot water. We've been able to use the dishwasher set to normal without it switching to pseudo energy boost.
I will be monitoring electricity consumption. Because we have a smart meter, we can see a graph of our electric use on an hourly basis. At this time of year, we average between 1 and 1.5 kilowatts per hour. I'll post more when I have more data.
No comments:
Post a Comment