Solar Panels Again

I also take back any recommendation I may have made for Momentum Energy, just had an e-mail from them with a huge price hike form January.

I'll be switching to Dodo in the next few days.

 

or, maybe just prop the gate?

 

Just go with a retailer that provides you with a reasonable FIT.

 

Not always the best result though, the higher FIT mob's I've looked at also charge more for usage. With our usage patterns, we're better of on the plans that have a lower FIT but also a lower usage and standing charge.

 

If you've just plastered your roof with solar (like I have), then the highest FIT generally wins, but yes if you have a 1.5kW system, it's a very different story.

 

10.2 kw on ours. 6.6 kw at my office. We're much better off wisth lower FIT & Lower charges on the 10.2 kw, I haven't looked t the office numbers, I'll do that as that's with momentum too. Be interesting to see if there's a difference as the usage patterns are totally different.

Office uses almost all of it's generation (office is open in the day, little to no electricity used evenings and nights). The house is empty in the day so exports most of the generation and buys back on a night.

 

Unless you have a pool, electric hot water and cooking, and maybe halogen downlights throughout the house, I can't see how you'd be better off on a lower FIT with lower consumption charges.
What's your daily consumption (after solar)? Ours is around 7kWh/day.

 

Pool, chlorinator plus septic & grey water systems (so another 2 or 3 more pumps there?).

No halogens - LED's throughout, but nothing is left on in the day other than the above plus the NBN box, router & Fetch TV plus an old plasma on standby.

Electric heating (split system, reverse cycle), kicks in for 30 minutes early morning for Her.

Our usage is 12 to 17 kw a day, which is obscene for two people with a 10 kw solar system. TV for maybe 1.5 - 2 hours per night MAX.

The bulk of our usage by far is the pumps, I put wifi smart sockets on most things, including the pump, they track consumption. The pool pump and chlorinator used 85 kw so far for December (8.5kw per day!!!!).

The smart sockets have a weather trigger set so if it's overcast or raining they don't switch the pool pump on, that way it should only kick on in sunny days to make most use of the solar.

When we first moved in, before I switched out the light's to LEDS and got my head around the heating timers and pool pump schedules etc we were burning through 50-70kw per day, which is disgusting for two people with a house mostly empty through the day.

Next upgrade is an eco pool pump. The one that's on would easily be 10 years old and has seen better days anyway.

 

Awesome! I've been steadily putting more and more Sonoff wireless controllers into my house as well. I just got two new ones that measure temperature and humidity yesterday.
One of them will control the fans in the house and switch them off at night when it gets cool (more of a comfort than an energy thing) and one is for the heating blankets in the cat beds that will turn on if it gets below 5C.

I've also just finished building a greywater system that diverts the water from my bathtub and showers to my veggies. But I only have a 850W pump that maybe runs 15 minutes a day, so nothing that'll make a big impact in terms of consumption.

 

That was the biggest reduction to power consumption for us, we had one that was over 10 years old and when it came on you could see the power spike by over 1KW. We only had it on 3 hours a day. the new one is brushless and varies its speed so most of the time it runs at minimum speed and consumes around 100W - 200W much much better and because of that we have it on for 6 hours a day resulting in a lovely pool .

Major consumers of power for us now are the oven, electric hot water and the dishwasher. Hmmmm maybe I could hang a sous vide bag in the shower and do the dishes in there also, kill 3 birds with 1 stone .

We consume around 25 to 30kWh a day with 13 of that being sedentary.

We are in the same boat as you, connection fee is more useful to me that FIT. I just had my plan rejigged and got my daily connection fee dropped from $1.31 per day to $0.91 per day. FIT stays on $0.161 per kWh and from grid stays at $0.2772 per kWh.

Our last bill was $57.50 on the old plan, the new one would lower that to $20.7.

We also had 4 days where my Tesla gateway went offline so we pulled everything from the grid and didn't fill the battery or push anything from solar so that cost 20 bucks or so.

Hoping next qtr for the first time ever to get a negative bill .

 

Nice one @spludgey mine are just cheap Kogan socket timers, very surprised how good they are though. Bought a couple on a whim to try (mainly as the old analogue timers annoy me when the rattle as they tick over). They turned out great so I bought a bunch and swapped all the lamps out.I also put one on the kettle and one on the har straighteners. They are set to switch off at midnight every night, then in the morning you just press the button on the socket to wake it up. That way, when we go away, you always know the fire hazard stuff shuts of automatically until you get back.

I'm paranoid about the kettle since a mate of mine turned into his factory one morning and all that was left on the work bench was an element in a circle of melted plastic and a black wall! Just lucky there was thing flammable near it.

The Kogan app is pretty simple, but you can do things like group sockets together into a "scene", so although all the laps are on timers, when we go to bed I can hit one button to shut the lot off in one go (or wake them all up).

There are some basic triggers you can add in along side the timers, so the app itself pulls in the weather forecast, like I said, great for the pool pump as I have it on an 8 hour timer in the day but not to come on if it's overcast or raining.

Each one has it's own section in the app so you can track power usage real time and over time.

@Dan Donoghue what pump did you get? I'll definteley be replacing ours in the next few months, We replaced the one in the old house about 11 years ago with an eco one but the pump itself was about $2k (I think the pool shop saw coming to be honest). I'll be ordering my own and fitting it myself this time.

EDITED to add - I've put Sensibo's on all the split systems too, I'm still fine tuning the scheduling and triggers on those, but so far so good. I think I'd look at alternatives to Sensibo if I had to do it over, not impressed with their scheduling at the moment.

 

Holy moses. Our household is 3kwh/day (although we're in Melbourne).

 

We consume around 29kWh per day for the wife and I but we are home all day most days. When we go away (eg on holidays), this drops down to around 20kWh per day.

The pool is on a reduced tariff and it consumes 14kWh per day on top of the above.

 

@Propagate: Sounds like the capabilities of what you have are pretty similar to what I have. The reasons I preferred the Sonoff solution for me personally was:

• They're not visible as they're in the wall cavity
• Work for lights as well as power points
• There are a large range of specialist ones, such as power meter, temperature ones, LV, etc
• They work with Google Home (I would assume there's a good chance your ones do too)
• They have inching mode
• They're $7 a pop

Obviously the downsides are that they are more work to install and that *cough* you need to get a licenced electrician to do so.
But all roads lead to Rome. While my wife hated "having robots" in the house, she's starting to come around to it, as she can turn the light of in our bedroom by instructing Google to do so.

 

2 fridge freezers, 1 bar fridge, 5 TV's on standby, XBox, PS4 and Switch on Standby, PC on 24/7, general electric stuff like router, NAS, 5 Raspberry Pi's, Pool pump for 6 hours, automated irrigation system for 1 hour, electric hot water uses about 13 a day (our sedentary use) then we use another 12 to 18 on air con units, kettles, oven, washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer sometimes, watching TV, playing game systems and charging just about every battery powered device known to man.

Our usage is fairly high for 2 people but the missus is at home during the day and I work from home fairly often which means the home office (detached building) needs cooling with aircon and hot water / kettles running also.

How on earth are you only using 3kwh a day? That means without solar or battery your bill should be around $93.75 per qtr?? I have never heard of such low usage or do you mean you have solar and 3kWh is how much you draw from the grid after you have consumed your solar?

 

Our pool used to be on reduced tariff but with the new pump it runs happily on the solar .

@Propagate I had to replace the entire system, pump, filter, everything. it was $5K installed and the model is Viron V35 by Astral pool (Supplied and installed by Jims Poolcare).

 

That's an average straight from my electricity bill from the past year. Your bill $ estimates sound about right. No solar.

2 people, Melbourne climate, gas hot water/stove/oven, canvas pull down awnings over west facing windows, ceiling fans, electric blankets in bedrooms for winter. All CFL/LED lights. Living room A/C 21 degrees max in winter, 27 degree min in summer but mainly only used if it's a stinker (maybe 20 days use in summer?). We're mindful of our usage without being over the top.

Late 60's era unit.

 

Wow man, that's brilliant, We had a similar setup at our old place in Sydney (Gas water, cooking and heating) but even then I think we still came in around $180 per qtr. Although we weren't as mindful as you with our power consumption

 

Got our first bill over the weekend since the solar feed in started. Wasn't quite a full month (about 4 days short), our bills have been between $230-$280 per month, this bill came in at $9. Pretty happy with that.

Momentum are jacking their prices way up from January though, so I did a spreadsheet at the weekend and plugged in the top providers in Vic based on costs from the Energy Easy comparison site.

If anyone is interested, open the attached spreadsheet and in the red (yellow text) boxes put you usage, export and number of says in base on your own bills (VICTORIA only), and the bottom 8 lines will give you the actual costs from each listed company (top 8 lines are their current fees).

I think we'll go with either Elysian or Dodo.

Don't forget to so a summer and winter bill, the ones that are cheapest in summer aren't necessarily so in winter. The more bills you have, the better yo'll be able to drill down value.

Also watch out for the minus sign (pretty hard to see in the bold font), a resulting minus figure is "credit",

Cheers.