Anyone else finding this winter a lot darker than usual or is it just me?

Yeah, it's not just you. My system data backs this up pretty convincingly — I've been logging daily yield figures since 2019 and this winter has been noticeably worse than the previous three. November in particular was dire. I'm in the Midlands and I think we had something like 11 consecutive days where my 4kWp array barely broke 0.8kWh total for the day. That's genuinely grim.

The issue isn't just cloud cover either — it's the quality of the light even on partially clear days. Low sun angle combined with persistent haze has absolutely hammered my morning and afternoon generation windows. My Victron MPPT logs show the panels hitting peak output for maybe 90 minutes around solar noon on a "good" day, then dropping off sharply.

I've been supplementing more heavily with grid top-up than I'd like to admit, which is frustrating after the investment I've put into the system.

Worth checking whether your panels need a clean as well — I noticed a decent uptick after wiping mine down last week. Surprising how much grime accumulates over autumn.

Anyone else actually pulling their historical yield data to compare? Would be interesting to see if this is geographically consistent across the UK or whether Scotland/Wales/South are having different experiences. My gut says this is a broader Atlantic weather pattern thing rather than anything localised, but proper data would settle it.

My Fogstar batteries have seen more action from the mains charger this winter than the panels — they're practically forgetting what sunlight looks like.

@Ozzy that's really interesting you've got the data to back it up — I've been going on gut feeling but my Victron VRM stats tell the same story. October through December my average daily yield was down roughly 30% compared to last year.

Living on the boat makes it worse — I'm often moored up in spots where winter sun angles mean I get maybe 3-4 usable hours on a good day, if the cloud even breaks at all.

What's kept me sane is having decent battery capacity to buffer through the bad runs. Even so, I've been much more deliberate about load management — shifting anything heavy to midday and just accepting that some days the panels are basically decorative.

Anyone else experimenting with wind to compensate? Curious whether it's worth looking into for supplementary generation.

@Ozzy would be curious what your November and December averages look like compared to previous years — numbers rather than impressions are useful here.

I don't have years of history to compare against (only moved to the static van setup mid-2022) but my Victron MPPT logs are showing some pretty grim daily yields. Had a run of eight consecutive days in December where I didn't break 200Wh from a 400W array. That's not a sizing issue, that's just genuinely poor irradiance.

Worth checking if it correlates with your postcode's cloud cover patterns or whether it's more widespread. The Met Office does publish historical sunshine duration data if anyone wants to cross-reference against their yield figures rather than relying purely on gut feeling.

@Ozzy living on the boat I feel this in a very real way — no option to just plug into the mains when yields drop, so I've become pretty attuned to the patterns.

This winter has definitely felt different. My Victron MPPT stats show strings of 4-5 day periods with basically nothing useful coming in, which I don't recall being this frequent before. Whether that's genuinely worse solar irradiance or just more persistent cloud cover I couldn't say without the kind of logging you've been doing.

Curious whether your worst stretches are longer in duration this year, or just more frequent shorter ones? That distinction matters quite a bit for battery sizing calculations — a 5-day gap hits very differently to five separate 1-day gaps across a fortnight.

@DaiYoung56 same boat, quite literally — well, mine's moored up for winter now but the garden office is taking the hit instead. What's really got me this year is how the low sun angle compounds everything; even on a clear day the panels are barely getting a useful window before the shadows from next door's oak creep across.

I've started running my Victron MPPT data alongside a simple notebook log of cloud cover, just to separate "genuinely fewer photons" from "bad angle plus obstacles." The photon count really does seem down. Some days in December the office system pulled less than a January two years back — and that January had three consecutive snow events.

Really interesting thread. @Ozzy your logging approach is exactly the kind of thing that separates gut feeling from actual evidence — I've been meaning to do something similar but have been a bit inconsistent with it, which I'm now regretting!

My anecdotal take matches yours though. December especially felt brutal — I had several consecutive days where my panels were barely registering anything useful. Not just low irradiance but that horrible flat grey light that seems to go on forever.

@DaiYoung56 the boat situation sounds genuinely stressful. At least on land I can make some awkward lifestyle adjustments and limp through. Do you find you end up running your engine more for charging, or have you got another fallback?

Wondering whether anyone's looked at whether this correlates with the jet stream position this year — I've seen some vague mentions of it being further south than typical.