Hi, my name is Mike.
I installed my Vue last weekend. A couple years ago I installed a nice solar array. Based on the size of the system and my power consumption, it was only going to cover about 80-90% of my usage. Where I’m at, if you produce more than you consume then you don’t get extra credit (on an annual basis) so there’s no incentive to over size your system. I am interested in figuring out how to close the gap though. So I figured that if I added some sort of monitoring system I could figure out where all the power was being consumed and then figure out how to selectively reduce it. So far, the first thing I’ve done is to change my HVAC fan setting from continuous to Auto. I had good reasons to run it in continuous mode but when I saw that it was using about 400 watts, 24 hr/day, I figured it would be worth it to only turn it on when needed. Like I said, I’ve only had the system for a week so I don’t have a lot of data yet. Hopefully, I can make a bunch of little changes or modify some behaviors to shrink the gap to my solar production and not have to pay an electrical bill in the future.
