Every Picture Tells a Story

Today's photo is not a sound wave from the Rod Stewart 1971 Album of that name with it's, for me very memory packed, track Maggie May.

No, it's a record of what I did and didn't do for the entire day, from 00:00:01 to 23:59:59 and the weather during the light hours. I can hear you all shouting - "If that's the case, great and now don't add any more blurb". Sorry.....more to come.

It's the chart of our electricity consumption (top) and PV solar panel electricity generation (bottom). Today was a miserable cloudy and increasingly cold day.

At 01: 15, consumption has a slight peak as I switch on the coffee machine when Angie returns from her day trip to the 5-day AMERICANA Western Riding Horse competition, evening show and trade show, at Augsburg, about an hour from here. A friend in the village had a spare ticket (for "spare" read "hubby doesn't want to go") for the evening show. Angie volunteered to buy hubby's selfless waiver and the two set off yesterday morning. While I drank the coffee, I got a blow by blow account of the day.

At 7:30 the upper chart shows a slight bit of red - the 10kW battery was now empty and we were now "buying" electricity. Luckily the sun did make a brief appearance shortly afterwards and started to recharge the battery. Angie, however, switched on the dishwasher at 10:00 just as the sun disappeared. She says she had no choice, the machine was full and had to be run.

She then disappeared to Ottobeuren to dog walk and shop while I mowed a horse field - water meadow would be more appropriate. It's the rented field outside the property which the horses have been on a night for the past week. It has dreadful drainage and was a nightmare to mow and looked like a ploughed field by the time I had finished. Took me longer to clean the mower than it did to mow.

13:00 back indoors for a cup of coffee and a bite of lunch. And then to watch the rain while I sat at the PC and watch the live chart of hurricane Irma, chat to a friend in Jacksonville, Florida and simultaneously check how little electricity was being generated by the PV and how low the battery was.

15:45 Today is not going to be a money earner and no chance of heating our warm water tank with electricity. Switch on wood pellets system.

17:00 Desperate to get warm and yet avoid switching the pellets unit from "Boiler only " to "Central Heating", switched on our sauna, heated as one can see by electricity. There followed a sauna session for us both. I did also light the wood log fire in the sitting room.

17:45 the battery is now empty and from now on every Watt we use is being bought.

19:00 Angie starts cooking dinner and at around 20:15 we sit down in front of the TV.

21:15 Cup of coffee#

22:15 Hot water bottle

In terms of self-sufficiency the good news is that we used 99.99% of the electricity generated, just 310 Watts sold to the electricity company giving us about 4 cents income! Bad news we had to buy 3.50 Euros worth of electricity.

6 months ago we would not have made any thoughts about switching on/off various electrical equipment but nowadays quite involuntarily it is constantly in our thoughts! One has to also rethink - machines which one used to use with a bad conscience, suddenly become attractive again. Better to use the electric chainsaw than the petrol one, at least on a sunny day.

I mentioned recently when Mercedes came by to do some maintenance on the PV battery unit, that they were at the moment not pursuing a policy to have the units integrated on the online service the rest of our PV has. Their argument is that too much detail about personal habits are available and thus makes the property potential robbery targets. The information in the chart I show is not from Mercedes but from the supplier of the PV inverters.

Given the events this week from Equifax and the millions of stolen personal data from customers in the USA, Canada and the UK, I guess they have a point.