You should be able to ask them for the year's bills broken down into the rates and usage. This will show you your total kWh usage which you can compare to last year's kWh. If you used more it can be from many many things. Air conditioning can be big depending on your climate, but also lighting, plug loads, and appliances. We provide energy modeling for homes and the most difficult part is predicting plug loads because they vary so greatly year to year and individual to individual.
The other item could be your program with your utility. Net metering simply means they buy it back from you, but how do they buy it back? At market rate? At a preset rate? What about overproduction? Do they reduce their buyback rate once you overproduce in a given month? All of those would effect that actual rate they pay for your solar. Also, if you used more electricity during on-peak times, means you paid a higher rate for the electricity. There's a few items about solar on our website, and feel free to send us any other follow up questions if it'll help.
You have to find another supplier. It seems that they are inefficient. Talk to an expert from businessswitchonline.co.uk and you can definitely get better results. They can also determine what's wrong with your consumption.
If you have a 2-meter system, there should be one meter to tell you how much the panels produced, then your regular meter to show what the electric company thought your total was.
Another possibility is that the information on how much the panels produced is stored on the inverter, and might be accessed either by computer, or looking at a display panel, if the inverter has one.
It could be that you used a lot more electricity because of a hotter summer (air conditioning), or colder winter (even if you have gas heat, the circulating fan takes a lot of energy).
A way to tell whether something has gone very wrong with your system is to look at the peak power produced at noon. For example, on a clear day, say the power reads as 3.7 kW. On another clear day at the same time of year, you would look for a similar amount of power. If you see 3.5 kW, that could just be normal variation and wearout of the panels. If you see 3.0 kW the next year, something is wrong, better get it checked out. You have to be proactive about getting the leasing company to check their system. They have no incentive for it to be working well - they get paid the same from you regardless of how much (or how little) it produces. If you're paying them per kWh produced, then disregard my last remark.
Do you have air conditioning? Was this summer hotter than last?
I have leased solar panels at home. They are sized to produce about half of my house's electricity need. The utility uses net metering to bill me.
Last year my true up bill was about $800 and this year it was almost $1100. I am trying to figure out what caused this increase. The solar company says that the panels produced about the same electricity both years. The utility company says that my usage must have increased. I did not add any new appliance and my existing appliances did not malfunction. Either the solar company is lying about how much power the panel produced or something weird happened in the house to increase the usage. The utility also said that the rate did not go up. What options do I have to get to the bottom of this mystery and how to avoid it in future?
