{"id":11110,"date":"2026-10-01T13:40:29","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T13:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/?p=11110"},"modified":"2026-10-01T13:40:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T13:40:29","slug":"solar-day-2026-09-30-102-2-kwh-in-3-2-kwh-refused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/2026\/10\/01\/solar-day-2026-09-30-102-2-kwh-in-3-2-kwh-refused\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar day 2026-09-30: 102.2 kWh in, 3.2 kWh refused"},"content":{"rendered":"

2026-09-30<\/strong> — 102.2 kWh harvested, 16.5 kW peak, 96.8 kWh used by the house. And 3.2 kWh that never got collected at all<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Solar<\/p>\n

The amber line is what the array could have made; the green is what it did. From 13:40 to 15:25<\/strong> the two come apart, and the gap between them is energy that was available and simply not taken — 3% of the day’s potential<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Nothing was broken. The battery was full, the house was not asking for much, and a grid-free system with nowhere to put power does the only thing it can: it throttles the array back until generation matches the load. You can watch it happen — through that window PV tracks the house within a couple of hundred watts, and charge power sits at zero.<\/p>\n

That is also how you tell curtailment from cloud. Cloud cuts generation while the battery is still hungry. Curtailment only happens when there is nowhere left to put it.<\/p>\n

The fix is a load, not a panel<\/h2>\n

More array would do nothing here; the array is already being told to stop. What is missing is somewhere for the surplus to go between roughly noon and four.<\/p>\n

A car is a 60 kWh battery that happens to have wheels. On the 10\/4 cord at 24 A it draws 5.76 kW<\/strong> — and the shortfall on this day averaged less than that, so plugging in through the curtailed window would have absorbed 3.2 of the 3.2 kWh<\/strong>. That is about 11 miles of driving<\/strong> that otherwise evaporated as heat the panels never made.<\/p>\n

Charging the car at midnight is the habit. On a system like this it is exactly backwards: midnight charging comes out of the battery, while noon charging comes out of sunlight that is currently being refused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2026-09-30 — 102.2 kWh harvested, 16.5 kW peak, 96.8 kWh used by the house. And 3.2 kWh that never got collected at all. The amber line is what the array could have made; the green is what it did. From 13:40 to 15:25 the two come apart, and the gap between them is energy that … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Solar day 2026-09-30: 102.2 kWh in, 3.2 kWh refused”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11111,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11110\/revisions\/11111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schindlerengineering.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}