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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Our system generates about 10 MWh per year (10 million watts of electricity). Our house isn't that big (1800 sq feet) and we have all LED lights and the highest energy saving appliances. We don't use anywhere near that many watts in a year. Our surplus credits easily cover our energy costs during Winter.

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> (10 million watts of electricity)

10 million watt-hours of electricity

Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.

Yeah, I don’t know the right way to write it. When I look at the app the reports our solar panel output and say I just want the output for all of 2020, it reports a figure just shy of 10 MWh. The previous years were close to the same figure. How do you say what the total output from a system was over an entire year?

10 megawatt hours is fine. 10 megawatts is incorrect. It's a mistake of units. A MWh is an energy measure while a MW is a power measure. That's what the parent was correcting.

You can say 36,000 Megajoules if you prefer :-)

That sounds great. What kind of heating system?

Natural gas furnace. I probably would have gone electric if we had installed the furnace after the solar panels went in. But, our natural gas bill is so small that I don’t really worry about it.

If that furnace is "smart" enough, you could add electric heater as additional external heat source. My wood pellet furnace has such options, but I think that if I simply added some electric heater into main loop, it would just work less (it can change it's output power from 24kW down to 7kW or just turn off burner if main loop is hot enough).

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