Smart Home Blog

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Returned back home to find a roof on our smart home extension after an amazing weekend in Monaco with my daughter, watching the Formula e-Prix 'double header' as guests of the DS Penske team 😎

This is good because the in-roof solar installation starts next week!

Another month where our solar generation covers our gas and electricity bills 🙂 And this includes charging two CUPRA Borns.

Another new generation high for 2025 with 46.3kW 🌞 This is about as good as it gets. The best I've ever seen is 46.4kW ever. Until now ...

All my previous solar stats are about to be surpassed 🙂 Orton & Wenlock arrived this morning to install the new in-roof solar panels.

With the first decently sunny day, I'm beginning to get a handle on how the new extension solar is performing. It generated 23.5kWh today and I expect this to rise as the sun gets higher. As our house faces 27° East of South, the West facing panels will get more sun and out perform the East facing panels. The East facing panels mean we are generating usable energy about 45 minutes earlier and the West facing panels mean we are generating for another 2 hours into the evening. This latter generation is really useful, especially when the air conditioning is installed. It is also adding significantly to the total generation with over 8kW being seen regularly and peaks over 9kW. The sun hits both sides of the extension roof from about 10am to 3pm, resulting in a wide peak around 3kW.

With over 61kWh being produced in total, the extension solar added another 63% to our generation and export capability. The new panels are slightly larger but, the West facing panels are generating more energy in a day than the South facing panels, partly because of the roof angles.

Impressive exports today, considering the 3kW immersion heater was on for most of the day. We are having gas boiler work done as part of the smart home extension. With this much solar generation and a Tesla Powerwall, a smart/variable solar hot water diverter is basically redundant. Binary on/off control works fine.

It is amazing how long the electric immersion heater takes to heat up our hot water tank 😮

Starting to see what the extension solar can do with 24.2kWh generated today. I think 30+kWh is possible and I know the South facing panels can do 46+kWh. We should get close to 80kWh on a perfect sunny day.

We generated 65.2kWh in total.

Generation from our East facing panels starts before 5am and is generating useful power by 6am. The power peaks at around 1.8kW and by 9am we generated 5.1kWh from this East roof alone.

By 9am our total (S + E + W) generated power reached 6kW.

At 9am our total (S + E + W) energy generation was 12.3kWh.

At 9:30am the sun starts to fall on our West facing panels and both sides of our extension roof start to contribute. By 10am this is more noticable and the combined E + W power is 2kW, with 7kWh generated by these two roof aspects.

At 11am the E + W panels are generating 2.6kW and 9kWh in total. At 11:15am the generation hits 2.9kW. The peak power from the East and West roof combined hits nearly 3.5kW.

At 11am the total S + E + W generation is 25.6kWh.

At 11am the total S + E + W power generation hits 8.3kW.

The new extension solar has made a big contribution to our monthly generation, despite only being present for half of May. The extension solar averaged 17.8kWh per day, with a low of 9.4kWh and a high of 24.2kWh. This is about 56% of the South facing roof, which averaged 31.6kWh. This is a combined average of 49.4kWh per day.

The smart home extension is now water tight! 😎