February 2010 EV & PV Report

Each month, I have been reporting how much solar energy our solar photovoltaic system has made and how much energy I have used driving my electric vehicle.

In late January, our inverted died. It is still under warranty, but because it had paint on it from when our house was painted, we were not able to cross-ship a replacement. Rather, the painted inverter had to be shipped to the manufacturer, repaired and then shipped back. Technically, the paint voided the warranty but the manufacturer was still willing to honor the warranty as long as we were willing to keep the painted case. That is good customer service.

The repairs were not quick and a shipping mix-up delayed the return even longer. Our inverter was not back in operation until Feb 26th. That is 38 days that we were offline, so there is very little PV energy generation to report. But I am glad this happened in February instead of the more productive June-August months.

As for EV driving, I logged 345 miles in the Chevy S10 EV, using an estimated 242 kWhs.