It’ll soon be 24 hours since the battery and solar went live here and today’s been a nice sunny day to give it a good test. Already the battery is full for later, the house doesn’t want much power and the panels, whilst not at their 4.050kW peak are already producing a nice 3.61kW which (with nowhere else to go) is gett8ng sent out to the grid. That’s actually frustrating because the facility to be paid for that export hasn’t been set up yet by the delivery network operator. Still, a good start.
Well, it’s an imperfect solution but it’ll do right now: plugging the car in means the house is now taking 6.38kW. The solar produces 3.54kW of that, the inverter then takes a further 1.79kW from the battery and that leaves 1.4kW being drawn from the grid (at 12.965p/kWh). The car will be back to 80% full inside an hour and then the home battery should top itself up again from the afternoon sun. It proved what I thought would happen so it’s a valuable exercise at a cost of 13p for about 25 miles
@christineburns My setup also has an EDDI energy diverter: after the battery is charged it heats my hot water tank. After that, it sends excess to the grid. But I think I need to add a 2nd battery to soak up more power too. https://www.myenergi.com/product/eddi/
eddi Power Diverter | Solar Power Solutions | myenergi

Maximise your self-generated solar or wind power with eddi by myenergi. Divert excess energy to your heating systems for efficient, green energy use at home.

myenergi GB
@christineburns I've daydreamed about hooking up the EDDI's output to a string of arm64 SBCs setup for Monero mining. And then piping the waste heat from *them* into my hot water tank. Or just using thermal glue and gluing the SBCs directly to my copper hot water tank. I just need to rig up a sequencer to power the SBCs up and down according to the available excess power.
@christineburns it can take a month or so to start getting paid for the export. One of the pain points about getting solar initially.
@smsm1 I know! On an optimistic note, however, the heat pump configuration and solar/battery design were both approved by the DNO in just over a day. It’ll depend on how quickly the installers complete the submission.
@christineburns there is also the energy provider too once the DNO have sent the confirmation. With checking out which documents you need for that so that you are prepared.
@smsm1 I discussed it with my Octopus project manager before the install and he’s raring to go and put the MPAN in their system
@christineburns time to run the dishwasher, washing machine and dryer!
@christineburns or bake, ovens take up a surprising amount of energy
@Nicovel0 It would be tempting to plug the car in if I could persuade it to throttle down to 3.2kW charge rate.
@christineburns @Nicovel0 we were in this position for months - basically an entire summer (slow DNO approval for a larger system). If you've got a "granny box" (3-pin car charger) it only uses 2-3kW, and can help absorb some of the excess. You have to manually plug it in though...
@Loungeiguana @Nicovel0 Crikey! I never thought of using the granny charger! You’re right, it would pull only 2.2kW and that would be met from the solar alone. I’ll do that next time if need be. I could grab the same 6.6kWh in three hours.
@christineburns @Nicovel0 hope you get your export tariff up and running soon. It's annoying (if virtuous) to be giving energy to the grid for free