Hi,
Yes, very nearly electricity neutral this month at home with our grid-tied PV, but it's been overcast for a week or so (with flash-flooding not very far away) so we're not quite at zero.
But I think there's a decent chance that we'll be net exporters for the next couple of months...
The end result in any case was that our electricity bill was half what our supplier had estimated based on (presumably) this time last year, which gives a warm feeling inside.
I'm also extending my off-grid system a little: a tiny 2W+ panel west-facing nearly flat and a 12Wp east-facing (again, nearly flat) and two more 12Wp beside that one tomorrow, all amorphous. The aim of these is (a) to extend the off-grid time towards dawn and dusk a little, and (b) capture diffuse light from cloudy skies. I've bought this rash of panels from a local electronics store (Maplin) because they have them at half price which makes them fairly competitive with buying larger panels from further up the food chain, and I'm not space-constrained.
That takes the off-grid system to almost exactly 120Wp, which might pump 10A max into my 40Ah SLA gel, ie C/4 peak, which I think is probably OK. Actually, that will almost never happen for one reason or another, ie all panels being fully illuminated at once, in part because they are pointing in different directions.
I'm also going to be putting my new ADSL modem onto the system to go off-grid when there is enough 'excess' power available. That increases my off-grid load by ~8W (maybe 40%) and is less than my separate SDSL and WiFi (~17W). This ZyXEL should be good to run directly from the 12V without a converter, and I'll have it diode-ORed with its mains power supply to ensure that it seems no drop-outs when switching between solar and not. That wastes a couple of Watts 'standby' but saves 6W mains power for the cost of a diode or five. I hope that my entire master Internet server and modem will thus be solar for maybe more that 8 hours each day in summer and an hour or two even mid-winter...
Rgds
Damon
