Here is a way of looking and your annual production over several years. The seasons can easily be seen. January is at the 1 O’Clock position so each quarter is a season. Winter begins at 12 O’Clock, Spring at 3 O’Clock, Summer at 6 O’Clock and Fall at 9 O’Clock. I have plotted my two years of data with the average. Your curve will vary depending on panel placement, your location and weather patterns among other factors.
Here is the Seasonal Capture Pie Chart
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Looks good how did you do it
I downloaded my monthly production data and put it into an Excel spreadsheet (you can also use Open Office freeware). I created a table of month by years and averaged the two years and used the radar or polar graph starting with December data. I chose the 20th day of the month since that is near the solstices and equinoxes. The second graph is a Pie chart of the seasonal production figures as percentages for the year. Winter is our wet season with the most cloudiness and Spring seems to be as productive as Summer.
Well done!
Without spending a lot of time reformatting my data, I took one of my existing charts and changed the chart type. The data I used is a rolling 30 day average of daily energy production. My “12:00” is mid August as that is the start/end of my net metering year. The second chart is the same data but in a linear chart.
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Great plots! Change your primary interval on the first plot to 1 week or 4 weeks and it should make it more readable.
After 8 years have you recouped your costs?
Payoff time was 7.1 years including the tax rebate. That was around mid August this year.
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I have run the numbers on PVOutput and come up with 6 years 4 months payout. I designed the system to zero my electric bill. The two years shown here netted me $83 and $168 respectively so the payout may be even sooner. One can hope.