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One Year of Real Data From My Solar and PowerWall System

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:24:38 +0000

On November 8, 2025, I marked the one-year anniversary of my home solar panels. Installed by Empower, the system includes 36 solar panels and two Tesla PowerWall batteries. Overall, it generated 17,122 kWh while my usage was 18,644 kWh, resulting in reduced utility bills. I find the system beneficial, despite minor issues.

Snowstorm Impact on Solar Production: 5 days Later

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:08:37 +0000

It’s been 5 days since the “big” snowstorm that covered the solar panels and today is the first day the temperature has really gotten above freezing:

Temperature for the past week (Jan 17 to Jan 25, 2025)

I’m finally starting to get back to some reasonable solar production:

Solar production - Jan 24, 2025

Looking back over the past 10 days, this is still significantly below pre-storm levels:

Snow Day: How much does snow affect solar production?

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 13:28:06 +0000

Panels covered in snow

It snowed yesterday (Jan 19th, 2025) and left a nice layer of snow on the solar panels, so I figured this was a good time to see how snow on the panels affects production. As you might expect, it affects it quite a bit!

Here’s a chart of solar production from last week, on Jan 14 2025: