January 2010 EV and PV Report

January's big news is that our inverter has died. This is the second one that had gone belly up since we had our system installed in November 2007. When I called the installer, they asked what brand and model it was and they were surprised to hear that it was an SMA since they don't often have to replace the SMA inverters.

To complicate things, they were not able to fix it here onsite and they were not able cross-ship a replacement. We had our home painted last year and part of the inverter was accidentally painted. This means that our painted inverter must be shipped to SMA, be repaired, and then shipped back to us. The inverter died on the 19th and was taken away on the 25th and it is still not back.

With this month's limited up time, the system only generated 35kWh. This is significantly less than Jan 2009's 123kWh. When the inverter is returned, perhaps I'll try to remove the paint so we can cross-ship it, if this ever happens again. I am glad that it has a 5 year warranty and I hope this is the last problem that we have.

As for electric vehicle (EV) driving, I logged 326 miles using an estimated 228kWh. With the cold weather and the 11 year old batteries, they started to "complain" (battery life light) near the end of my 20 mile commute even though I had more than 50% charge left. So during the coldest week, I drove the Honda rather than the Chevy S10 Electric. This also gave me 4WD which I needed on one of the snowy days.

Next month I'll report the reinstall of our inverter.