There are many forums , I think the best is this one .

http://forums.energymatters.com.au/

If you are concerned about the output , Ican tell my dissaponting one .
My system 1 year old now , 1.52 KW , delivered best result some time in december last year was 9.1 kw/h a day
Translate it to output per hour it was only 1.21 kw/h . Well below the specifications .
But as long it doesnt switch it self off , for no reason Iam not worried .

Thanks Vlasta and 9.1 kw/h a day would be a good day for me with my 10 panels and yesterday it was overcast and I only saved 10% instead of the 60% to 90% I'll check out that other forum you mentioned.

Have you guys who are right into energy saving looked into switched mode power supply i think its called?

I don't know much about it, but i'm sure an electrician or elect engineer may know a bit more but basically whenever you use an electrical appliance with lots of inductance (or coils and resistors) such as kettles, bar heaters, motors (pumps) and i think new TVs etc. it causes a lag in the power factor meaning you actually use more power than the rated power usage.

An electrical engineer was trying to explain it to me, but i didn't understand it fully and couldn't work out why people don't do something about it more often.. Maybe the savings are so minimal for the amount of time and money needed to invest...
So his job was to actually look at big industrial elect circuits and work out how to fit more motors onto a circuit without using any more power, and he would calculate the power factor and add the appropriate capacitors to bring the Phase lag closer to 0 meaning the circuit actually used less power.

Anyway, so something like a 2500W bar heater may have a power factor of 0.8 so in fact your using closer to 3000W.

So the switched more power supply circuit, i think, just opens and closes circuits with capacitors depending of your PF.


Im not claiming to know anything about this, just thought it was kinda interesting.

Thanks AaronD. Sound very interesting. I wonder if Julia or Anna have their experts onto this. If they offer a rebate I might be interested. Mind you it took me 9 months of tyranny just to get the rebates they offered for my solar hot water and solar energy generation investments.

Am I missing something here?, why doesn't anyone ever factor in the cost of the installation when determining "savings" made by using solar panels, don't you write off any of it in depreciation?

We have had stand alone solar power for over 4 years now and it has been great ( excluding cyclones mind you!) no power bills no black outs when the grid goes down.... some of our older panels were BP brand panels and would have been 30 years old this year and were still producing good power before they died.

we now have 12 new 80 watt panels on the roof a 5000 watt pure sine wave inverter and 6 x 215AH deep cycle batteries and even on cloudy days we still achieve good charge to our batteries, on a fully sunny day the panels constantly provide over 30+ amps.
We run a normal household consisting of fridge, washing machine, TV, dvd player, playstation and computers the only concession we have made is we don't use electric items with elements (frypans, toatsers and kettles due to the high power drain)
we also run low voltage 5W LED lights.
Hopefully in the next 12 month we can upgrade our system further to include more panels and more batteries.