Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Electric Cars

One of the advantages of having a solar array is that you should be able to download all your data from the portal to which the inverter is connected. This will give you generation and consumption data at 15 minute granularity.

So you can get a bunch of data into a spreadsheet to do a bit of modelling using different scenarios to see how your overall costs would be impacted by different rate structures. A good chance to brush up your knowledge of VLookup functions

Whether or not you could derive any useful conclusions is of course a different matter. The challenge of all this is figuring out which pattern of usage fits your lifestyle and daylight patterns - mainly in terms of when you can charge. This is where many working people find an overnight rate setup is more beneficial. There's no point producing loads of power off your panels if the car's stuck in the office carpark.

The following two charts are of fairly typical days, 6 months apart. The 15th June 2021 was a lovely sunny day and I produced 13KWh more than I could use or store in my battery, so this would have been an ideal day to charge the car. The 15th January this year was a typical grey winter's day with practically no generation so if I had to charge the car it would have been from the grid.