The Days My Solar Beat the Grid — 2026

On 30 days so far this year, the ground-level solar panels in my garden made more electricity across the day than I pulled from the grid. Not chipped in — beat it outright, midnight to midnight. For a small array behind a one-bed flat, that is a scoreboard I will happily take.

The wins bunch where the light is: 13 of 92 in spring, 17 of 58 in summer. Winter, as a garden array well knows, contributes almost none.

July was the strongest month so far — 84 kWh of sun against 113 from the grid, with solar ahead outright on 12 separate days.

One honest asterisk. 21 of the days the panels “lost” were plunge days, when Agile prices went negative and it made no sense not to gorge on grid power. Of the 259 kWh I imported on those days, 198 fell in half-hours priced below zero — paid to me, not by me. Mostly the battery filling on free power, the rest the flat's always-on baseline draw earning on those slots rather than costing.

None of that grid-gorging is luck. The calls about when to pull from the mains come from a charge planner I have been building for over a year — it hunts the cheapest half-hours, dives on plunge windows, keeps a buffer for the morning, and defends a hard battery floor. I wrote up how it grew from a crude timer into that here.

I am not off-grid, and the year's totals keep me honest: about 348 kWh of sun against 1,074 drawn from the mains, so the grid still does most of the lifting — much of it charging the battery cheaply overnight. But the win-days are the good days earning their keep, and each brighter week adds another.

The months, side by side