We had a difficult time with our solar installation. The essay Learning to Live with Solar Energy describes the difficulties and how we overcame them. In the process we learnt a lot about solar energy systems that we wish we had known before we started.

In the original document I anticipated making many changes to our system which I hoped would increase the amount of power we got from our system and concurrently reduce our consumption. In this revision, I report positively on these experiments. After a year I feel we have a solar system that allows us to live (largely) with the facilities we had when living "on grid". Many of the changes we have made could be applied by households living with a mains connection. As yet, the price of electricity is not sufficiently high to offer much incentive for such changes though this is likely to change in the future.

To read the Preface , the Introduction or to see the Table of Contents. Click on the link opposite.

To read the latest additions (which are not yet in the main paper) click on the updates link.

To download and read the the complete document (145KB) , in pdf format, click here read solar issues revised.pdf