Hi Richard,
Many thanks for your pm from the other forum. As you can see, I have managed to finf this one and, as you say, has some interesting posts. I am still somewhat baffled at the apparent discrepancy of peoples outputs. As I said, mine, commisioned late morning on 20th and consisting of 16 Sanyo 240HIT ( 8 west facing and 8 east facing) plus SMA400TL has now generated a total of 34.24 at close of play today> Averaged out, that is about 5.7kw per day. If the weather was cloudy, ok, but it has been pretty sunny the whole time since installation so I am, frankly disappointed. I was advised that the south facing roof was only big enough to accommodate about 6 panels bu I am beginning to wonder whether we have made a mistake and should have just had fewer panels on the directly south facing roof. I was led to understand that inverters need a certain total power output to operate efficiently and that 5 or 6 panels would not have worked well.
I can only assume that the low figures are a combination of the low sun not shining directly onto the panels and the shorter trajectory of the sun meaning that it seems to rise and set further to the south than it does say during the spring and summer.
Unless there is some fault with my system, I suppose I have to just wait and watch what happens in the spring/summer when the sun passes right overhead and SHOULD enable something close to peak output. All models I looked at sugested about 15% lower output totals for e/w than s but I seem to be getting much lass than that. Also how does the poster earlier in this thread manage to get what she does from an EAST facing array of the same size on the Scottish borders??!! Do you reckon my inverter is not well matched?