Tuesday, September 27, 2011

11 Days of Shade

Well, I'm beginning to think I need to build an Ark!! We've had weeks of rain and finally our hot water use has exceeded system generation capacity. So, I kicked on the electric backup for an hour to bring things back up to temp. Hopefully the sun comes out soon so I don't need to do that again. Back in April I turned off the backup to see how much hot water the system could generate. It's made 100% of our hot water (plus some) all summer long, so I left it off. Based on the graphs I've been keeping, I believe that we'll need the backup turned on full time in early November when the days get shorter and sun low in the sky. BTW, that hour or so ate up 7kWh to get things back up to temp. Glad we're not running that every day!