False start, I forgot to record the audio! Great if you're lip reading otherwise not so great.
Let's start again! This is our October 2021 performance figures for our solar pv and Tesla
Powerwall 2 here in the UK. Along with our Tesla Model 3, Hyundai Kona electric usage,
plus other things that have happened during the month. So stay tuned.
Hi John here and welcome. If you tune in regularly you'll know that I like to give
an update on what's been happening during the month before we get into the stats and figures.
I have an update on the Kona electric. On Monday the 25th of October I received a
call from Call who's the case manager for the recall for the battery packs for the Hyundai
company. She apologised for the delay in responding to my letters.
She said that she can initiate a buyback which is what I requested them to do.
She said the price of the the buyback price would be the cap price and she needed a few
days to find out what that would be and would call me back on Thursday. During the call she
did explain that the CAP price was the sort of dealer price. Although I've since learned that CAP
stands for Car Auction Price. More on that in a minute. She asked me how much I paid for the car.
This information was included in the letter that I wrote to them along with a copy of my invoice.
So obviously no research or preparation before the phone call. She also offered
me an option of moving my case up the waiting list if I decided I wanted to keep the car.
I said I'd make that decision once you came back to me with the buyback price.
The initial time frame for replacing the battery pack was between October 2021 and 2022. So it
could be a whole year before we get our battery replaced. She's saying by moving you up the queue
it would get done before Christmas. Put the phone down and thought well wait till Thursday.
Thursday arrived no call from Hyundai. Friday passed no phone call. I'm recording this on Monday
1st of November still no phone call. It is fairly typical of Hyundai's customer care.
In the meantime I went onto WeBuyAnyCar website and got a price of £27,625. I paid
£33,360 back in November 2018. Which works out at a loss of about... well not about exactly £5,735
over almost 3 years. Although we didn't actually get the car delivered until the 1st July
2019. So over two and a half years if you like. A loss of around £1,900 per year and
13,000 miles of motoring. Which actually isn't too bad for a brand new car off the parking lot
I guess. I'm now at a point where I will be getting rid of the car either back to Hyundai
depending on the price they give me or selling to someone like WeBuyAnyCar.com. I don't want to
be part of the Hyundai brand anymore. I moved from Toyota because they didn't offer battery electric
vehicles and continued to push their rather outdated hybrid technology. Hyundai looked great
and the product is good, it's just they're let down by really poor customer service, attention to
detail, lack of knowledge almost every interaction with them. Be it dealership level or direct with
Hyundai it has been a battle to get any information and the truth. So what are we doing?
Well we've decided to get a second smaller range battery electric vehicle. We currently have 2 300
mile plus range EVs sitting on the driveway and we probably only in fairness need one with that
range. Which means we're looking for a second car between 100-200 mile range something like
that maximum. And we'll get that once the the Kona has been sorted and sold. Let's talk about
heating. I've been using the 2 Far Infrared Panels which I've installed. We've got one 1800watt one
which is ceiling hung in my photography studio. This has been on twice during the month of October
when I've been working in there. The heat from there is brilliant it is just like standing
in the sunshine. You stand under the unit and you can feel the heat soaking into your body.
You move away from the unit and it's like like a cloud's gone over the sun.
Although if you leave the heater on for long enough it does heat up the fabric of the room.
However, if you're using it for short burst durations like I've been using
then it does need to be positioned where people are actually stationed to get the best from it,
e.g. if it's on the other side of the room then you're not really going to feel the benefit from
it unless it's left on to heat the whole fabric of that room over a longer period of time.
The other infrared panel is mounted in the ceiling in the double garage and this is directly
above one of the cars. As infrared heat objects rather than the air like a conventional heater
like you know wet radiators or hot air blowers or things like that I thought positioning it directly
above the car's bonnet would keep the car warm and prevent condensation forming during those
colder damper months. I'll keep you posted on that. The garage panel is a 720watt panel
and I do have 2 of them but today I've only installed the one of them. I will be installing
the second panel! I've also purchased some more Kasa smart plugs, so I can trigger the heaters
on and off and set time schedules to be on and off as well. So that's quite handy. I'm really happy
with the infrared panels they use much electric much less electricity than what I had. Previously
I used a portable oil heater which was our oil filled radiator thing on wheels that you can
move about and that was rated at 2000watts and that really needed to be on full power
for a long time to get the room to a sensible temperature
in my photography studio. That was sort of about 20º - 21º Celsius.
What else? Oh yes the twice yearly event of the clocks changing catches some products out.
As if it's been, you know, like a surprise event that they can't plan for.
This time it was myenergi products and the Tesla app that all fell foul of this.
The myenergi devices jumped back an hour a week too early despite
me having them set of get time and date from the cloud. Our zappi and eddi both lost an hour and
thankfully myenergi were really quick off the mark and provided an over-the-air firmware update very
very speedily. So full marks there. The downside to this update is that the myenergi app has lost
the ability to stop the zappi charging. A function that used to be there before the update. On the
eddyi we're on version 3.051 and zappi is on version 0.000 according to the app.
So that's obviously where the problem is. It's great that myenergi are so responsive
and engage with their customers. Here is a post from the myenergi forums
updating us on the issue. The time of the post it's 8:00am on a Sunday. So you know top marks to
to myenergi really. Go and talk to Hyundai about what good customer service looks like.
The Tesla app also had a similar anomaly with a scheduled charging feature for the car. If
you wanted to edit the off-peak times you had to choose 05:30 if you wanted 04:30. I'm sure that'll
sort it out over the next day or two. Actually I haven't checked since so I'll check that out and
see if that's fixed itself. I'm sure it would have done. So yeah when smart things are not so smart.
Let's move on shall we to our month stats. I'll bring up the graphic as normal which
you can pause the video if you want to review. Alternatively again all the bits and bobs are
down in the description down below as long as the components and their specifications.
Our generation numbers for October 2021 our south south west facing 6.34kW arrays produced
a total of 437kWh from the 2 arrays. I'm going to stop saying kilowatt hours and kilowatts,
I'll just give you the units. As expected a drop against September's total however as
you will see when we look at the year on year for previous Octobers it wasn't all bad news.
Our average daily solar generation was 14.1 for the month that gives us our total
generation figure for the period divided by the size of our solar array at 68...
loads of numbers and letters after it i'll bring it up on screen. So how did you all get on? Drop
your comments and details and totals down below as normal. Thanks very much. Let's have a look
at the 2 arrays our 4kW array produced 281 and our newer 2.34kW array produced 156.
And as you can see they're well above the October 2020 totals when we had a like for like setup.
October 2019 we only had the one array at that time. This chart looks at our overall self-power
for the month. We have been in cost-saving mode with the Powerwall. I haven't swapped it basically
during the month as I did in September bouncing in and out and all through the month. The solar
and Powerwall contributions accounted for 55% self power for the month. Which actually isn't too bad
I think. So yeah quite happy with that. This is the year-on-year chart and compares October from
2011 through to 2021 for the 11 years of data. The values from 2020 onwards are for
both arrays whereas before that they were just for the 4kW array. The 437 well ahead of our
2020 totals for the same setup by yeah by some country mile! This is the Powerwall in and out
and it's round trip efficiency. I'm still still not 100% convinced this is spot on in terms of
the money so to speak. A 83% round trip efficiency just seems a little low based on previous months.
It could be right and the Powerwall is now starting to heat the battery pack ready to
accept the solar input in the morning, because the outside temperature is getting a little bit cooler
and starting to drop. And remember our Powerwall is situated outside and in a rather windy side
of the house. So it could just be that and that percentage is correct. Well I'll keep my eye on
that and see how that manifests itself over the coming months. This chart is our day by
day which gives you a little bit more detail on the day by day during the month. House usage is
shown in blue. The peaks there are when we charge one of the EVs. We did quite a bit of charging
this month because we certainly use the Tesla a lot more this month as you'll see when we
get on to that. We also ran one of our glass kilns every day during the off-peak period
which adds about 6kWh minimum to the daily total for the house usage. And
even sometimes when the sun was out we would also run the kiln during the day and get that
free firing which is actually what we're doing today, 1st November it's really nice and sunny
outside so we've got one of the kilns on at the moment and it's being powered by solar.
We had in October we had 2 great solar days where we generated 30kWh during the day
and that was on the 6th and the 21st. And many of the days were a sort of really solid
15- 20 generated which you know really helped build up that good monthly total.
We also managed to keep our export to the grid low this month which is good to see
with the highest daily export of 4.8... sorry for yeah 4.8. Which was on the 20th.
We did have a few days of high grid pull shown in red which as I said were when we charged the
cars. This is the the chart which shows the 4 data sources we've just looked at in the day by day.
House is shown in blue, so it's a biggie this month um 1,112.9 versus our solar total of 437.
The house used a lot more energy and as a result use a lot more grid energy which we'll see in
a minute coming on to that chart. So this is our average daily house usage and our average
daily grid usage over the month. Not surprising the average daily house use was up to 35.9 so
that's the blue line. And our average daily pull from the grid was also up at 23.4 that's the red
line. It's a massive jump from September if you're looking at September figures but if you recall if
you watched last month's solar update we were all away on holiday for 2 weeks during that month so
effectively it's only just 2 weeks of data rather than the 4 weeks of data. This chart looks at what
we sent back to the grid. We sent 28kWh of excess solar back to the grid. Again last month if you're
looking at September was high because we were a holiday so unable to soak up the electrons.
But yeah nice to see a nice low figure for October especially as we had such a good
generation total from our solar panels. This is what we pulled from the grid so we consumed 726
which is down from previous Octobers. Actually October 2020 would have been a like-for-like
setup in terms of usage so you know that's good to see although we've used a lot we've actually used
less than we did last year. This is the eddi which heats our hot water from surplus solar.
I was actually surprised to see that despite being really sunny the eddi only diverted 15
of solar generation to heat our hot water during the month. And I think the main reason for that
is that I've scheduled a boost set each morning for an hour which tends to last all day to once
the the water's hot. That's probably why we're not getting so much boosting from the
solar. Running totals for the eddi are 342 for the year and 809 since installation. Look at the
cars. Oh yeah we had a big month on the Tesla. The Tesla Model 3 covered 920 miles during the month
bringing its total mileage to 15,532. No issues or problems to report. We did 2 supercharging
sessions where we added a total of 61.98, again all for no cost. Home charging added 280.41.
Unfortunately only 8% of our total charge for the month came from sunshine with 257.97 coming
from the grid. All this grid charging would have been off-peak using the Octopus Energy Go Faster
tariff at 5.5 pence. What else with the Tesla. Oh yeah I had 2 over-the-air software updates during
the month we now have the ability to adjust the charging amps going into the car from the app
which actually is really really useful. Previously you had to go and do that from the car itself.
We're now on software version 2021.36.5.5 which was downloaded and installed on the 27th of
October. The Kona covered just 295 miles in the month and now has a total mileage of 13,309 miles.
No software updates over the air this month, or any other month for that matter since ownership.
No issues or problems to report with a car either. That's it! Any questions then drop them down into
the comments below and I'll pick them up. As ever please comment, like, share. All of those
good actions help to get this video shown to more people on YouTube which in turn helps
my channel grow. Thank you for watching and I'll see you on the next video. Alright take care bye.