Since balcony power plants are limited to a maximum of 600W in Germany, the question naturally arises whether it is worth purchasing one. Even though this was not my motivation for this project, it would still be great if the savings would pay for the costs at some point.

But my motivation was more about reducing my CO² fingerprint. Lately, I've been working more from home, which means that my electricity consumption is also increasing. Since a balcony system only pays for itself through self-consumption, this circumstance is obviously appealing. Therefore, the first thing I did was to determine my electricity consumption over the course of the day. To do this, I built an electricity meter that counts the revolutions on my Ferraris meter (there may be an article on this in the future).

The figure on the left shows my approximate daily consumption when I work in my private office. My energy consumption can be neutralised by a balcony power plant on good days. I.e. self-consumption is very high during sunny hours > 90% I guess. However, 4 kWh per day is certainly only achievable on a few days in summer anyway, but I will make more precise calculations and write a separate article.