Charge with solar or off peak energy?

[Jim Hare]

Okay, still not clear on whether I'm better to charge our LEAF during the day with our 6.5kwh solar, or to use off peak electricity at night...

Not sure how we measure our other, non LEAF usage during the day. May be that we're already exhausting it and not selling any back to the grid.

Any advice on how to figure it out? Would love to know so we don't go 5 years doing the wrong thing.

At the moment we typically charge overnight, though a couple of times a month we forget and end up doing it in the morning.

[Brian]

Better economically ? Or better environmentally ?

In the first case, it depends on your retailer / feed in tarrifs. In our case, nocturnal charging is economically advantageous.

But, environmnetally, solar direct to the car is better for the climate because no nasty fossil fuel ( very probably dirty coal ) is used.

[Jim Hare]

Since our tariff is now like 20¢, hard to say which is better economically. Be good to know how much we use of our solar already since my wife and I both work from home so may already be using all the power we generate.

[Brian]

For the bike, I used a cheap plug-in meter between the power point and the charge lead. This recorded total kWhrs. So recording the start and finish readings gave the kWrs used per charge ( and hence ' cost ' ), which I recorded.

I am looking for a 15 Amp version to give me the same information for the Leaf.