Your Self Consumption %

Can anyone explain what self consumption means, I have googled it but still don’t understand what it means. In lay man’s language please.
Thanks

Bolts I believe self consumption should be the amount of solar energy generated that you have used yourself, in your case you used up 54.88% of what you generated in the home (could come from the battery if charged via solar) and 45.12% of your generation was exported to the grid

Cdent I concur with your explanation. It seemed odd to me that if you have a high generation figure, you can have a low self consumption figure because you exported a high proportion. I originally thought of it as how much of my consumption came from solar, but while that was a measure that I would find useful, it was wrong.

If you think about it from a power station point of view, it would be a key indicator: how much of what you are producing are you having to consume to operate? Ironically, it was called "house load" when I worked in power stations.

Tim yeah, self consumption for me isn't something I worry about as I get paid to export. If I could use more I would but I can't.

As an aside, when I worked in the contact centre for one of the "Big 6" someone once called stating that "their bill was too high, they weren't running a power station" to which I replied immediately (and without thinking!) "sir, if you were running a power station you wouldn't need to buy your energy from us". Thankfully he saw the funny side of it!

Thanks for the explanation
You guys who export have you looked at
Octopus Flux tariff?

All sounds sensible. But i can't see how they are working out the self consumption %
So, if i look at my energy flow figures and take the solar to home (135.69) plus battery to home (118.99) and that totals 254.68. And as a % of my solar production 447.66 is 56.9% So, what explains the small difference between this value and the 58.81% calculated by GE ?

I understood that "self consumption" was the percentage of total solar generation either used for the house load directly, or put into the batteries.

Maxwell
Here is how they arrive at the figures. Worth pointing out there are some fairly large errors in how they calculate these numbers......
Have included my report and how they arrive at what they do.
Hope this helps

Gets a bit messy in the Tariff Section of the GE report as they are including some figures and not others so it is not a true reflection of the £ values.

For example in the Tariff Section (top right hand corner) they exclude Grid Import in the "Consumption" figure which would be fine but then they include Grid Import into the "Import" figure.

If it was purely a reflection of the savings from Solar then they could remove the Grid Import Value from that figure and it would be ok.

If they want this to truly reflect your energy expenditure and savings from having Solar &/or Batteries then they need to rework this so it is correct.

Frankly in the scheme of things that need resolving I would say fixing the firmware issues or at least supplying correct Data Sheets for equipment should be higher on the list....

Bolts I'm on Flux now yeah, seems to be quite good, earning around £2 a day on average

Reverse engineering their numbers, they calculate it as (solar to house + solar to battery - battery to grid) / solar production. I have checked this against my reports and the ones above and it it matches when rounded to the 2 decimal places they display.

dragon2905 Thanks for sharing your figures, makes me glad i have a single tariff. I tend to agree that GE have a number of other issues they should be addressing. Although, for these you'd imagine they would be a relatively quick fix compared to some of the others.

4monks Ta, don't know why i didn't try that combination. Must have been looking straight through it.