NSPD: New Solar Panels Day!

grungebob

Any updates for us?
im looking to put in a 4.2kw array and battery. I’ve been quoted £9500 which is a bit much I think. 

The energy trust reckon I’d gen 2500kw a year but only save £360 which I find baffling as my usage is about 5920 a year. 

Just trying to see if the maths works out as I’m on a fixed deal (so seen no price hikes yet) until September 

merlin

You should be able to power your pedal board easily from that. 

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

grungebob said:

Any updates for us?
im looking to put in a 4.2kw array and battery. I’ve been quoted £9500 which is a bit much I think. 

The energy trust reckon I’d gen 2500kw a year but only save £360 which I find baffling as my usage is about 5920 a year. 

Just trying to see if the maths works out as I’m on a fixed deal (so seen no price hikes yet) until September 

So far so good. Few weeks in and haven't paid a penny for any electricity used (just the daily standing charge for being on the grid), and I think the lowest I've seen my battery go down to is about 66% after a cloudy evening where I also did a fair bit of cooking and making cups of tea/coffee as we had friends round for dinner.

On a sunny day like the past few the panels have been generating up to 30kw/h of power in 24 hours. I've only ever used a fraction of that, with the remainder going mostly back into the grid aside from whatever is needed to charge the battery to full.

Only niggle so far has been the massive delays with the Powergrid in terms of getting me registered as an energy exporter so I can actually start getting paid for all the kw/h I'm putting back into the grid! Apparently the applications used to come back within a week, but such has been the explosion in demand with all the new solar installs going on it's now around 8 weeks expected turnaround time! 

grungebob

Dontgiveupyourdayjob said:

grungebob said:

Any updates for us?
im looking to put in a 4.2kw array and battery. I’ve been quoted £9500 which is a bit much I think. 

The energy trust reckon I’d gen 2500kw a year but only save £360 which I find baffling as my usage is about 5920 a year. 

Just trying to see if the maths works out as I’m on a fixed deal (so seen no price hikes yet) until September 

So far so good. Few weeks in and haven't paid a penny for any electricity used (just the daily standing charge for being on the grid), and I think the lowest I've seen my battery go down to is about 66% after a cloudy evening where I also did a fair bit of cooking and making cups of tea/coffee as we had friends round for dinner.

On a sunny day like the past few the panels have been generating up to 30kw/h of power in 24 hours. I've only ever used a fraction of that, with the remainder going mostly back into the grid aside from whatever is needed to charge the battery to full.

Only niggle so far has been the massive delays with the Powergrid in terms of getting me registered as an energy exporter so I can actually start getting paid for all the kw/h I'm putting back into the grid! Apparently the applications used to come back within a week, but such has been the explosion in demand with all the new solar installs going on it's now around 8 weeks expected turnaround time! 

Wow 8 weeks!
appreciate the response. 

Tannin

Good for you @Dontgiveupyourdayjob ; And having east-west panels is a positive advantage. In the old days of well-over-market feed-in tariffs, the name of the game was to generate the highest possible amount per day, so sun-facing panels were the go.  

These days, feed-in tariffs are much lower (though generally still higher than a market rate) so the aim should normally be to maximise self-consumption. You save more by not buying from the grid than you lose by not selling to it. So a split system with east-facing and west-facing panels is ideal: you start generating significant power earlier in the day, and keep on generating well after a south-facing panel has given up. 

Of course, given your battery setup, the normal considerations don't apply. On the down side you are generating a bit less than you would with 12 south-facing panels; on the up side you are maximising self-consumption which means less wear and tear on the battery (they have a limited number of charge/discharge cycles before they need replacement). It's probably six of one and half a dozen of the other. And in your case, you don't really have a choice anyway.

We had 8 north-facing panels installed when the house was built but no battery. There seems no pressing need to expand or add a battery insofar as Tasmania is zero-carbon electricity anyway (we have hydro, wind, and solar, with lots more wind and pumped hydro on the way to allow major power exports to mainland Australia) so there is no environmental benefit, just the cost factor, and that's not compelling.

The one reason we are seriously considering a battery system is bushfires.  If the power goes off, we lose our house water (tank), our garden water (dam) and our bore water, so firefighting becomes problematic. Yes, we have petrol-powered pumps, but it would be much better to have a battery which, so long as we pay the extra to get a mains-isolation switch* put in, would let us simply turn on a tap or pump unlimited water from the bore.

(* Normally, even though you have solar and a battery, when the mains power goes off, the house power goes off. This is a regulatory requirement to avoid electrocuting linesmen in the street. But you can either go completely off-grid, or else have a special isolation switch.)

DuploLicks

Dontgiveupyourdayjob said:

grungebob said:

Any updates for us?
im looking to put in a 4.2kw array and battery. I’ve been quoted £9500 which is a bit much I think. 

The energy trust reckon I’d gen 2500kw a year but only save £360 which I find baffling as my usage is about 5920 a year. 

Just trying to see if the maths works out as I’m on a fixed deal (so seen no price hikes yet) until September 

So far so good. Few weeks in and haven't paid a penny for any electricity used (just the daily standing charge for being on the grid), and I think the lowest I've seen my battery go down to is about 66% after a cloudy evening where I also did a fair bit of cooking and making cups of tea/coffee as we had friends round for dinner.

On a sunny day like the past few the panels have been generating up to 30kw/h of power in 24 hours. I've only ever used a fraction of that, with the remainder going mostly back into the grid aside from whatever is needed to charge the battery to full.

Only niggle so far has been the massive delays with the Powergrid in terms of getting me registered as an energy exporter so I can actually start getting paid for all the kw/h I'm putting back into the grid! Apparently the applications used to come back within a week, but such has been the explosion in demand with all the new solar installs going on it's now around 8 weeks expected turnaround time! 

@Dontgiveupyourdayjob ; - Digging the thread out of my old bookmarks, if you don't mind me asking...

how's the system running almost 2 years later?

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

System is going great guns @DuploLicks. Especially on weeks like the one we've just had, consistently churning out >3000kw of carbon free power for several hours a day, most of which is going straight out to the grid as excess generation for others to use.

Some graphs from the app to give crude illustrations...

Firstly, this is the month so far showing total generation, how much I used myself (green) and how much was exported to the grid (yellow). You can clearly see the days where I charged my EV car where the green is higher.



This one is how much I've used form self generated power (green) and power that I've imported from the grid (red)...



These are the same graphs but for each month of the year to date instead of daily...




And these are year to date stats for a) how much I've earned exporting energy to the grid, and b) how much I've paid year to date on importing energy from the grid (doesn't include the scandalous standing charges though!)...

A)

strtdv

That's impressive. Presumably you've combined that with an EV tariff that lets you fill your battery during the night with cheap electricity and use it during the daytime? 

I'm seriously looking at getting some panels fitted next year, probably something in the region of 6kw with 9.5kWh of battery storage and a diverter to let me heat the water cylinder. 

I reckon it'll mean I use no electricity or gas in the summer months, with a significant reduction in electricity from April until the end of September. 
That sort of system is likely to be expensive though (I'd estimate about £12-14k) so the payback time will be long (perhaps 20 years?).

It would also push our EPC rating up to a B which would be pretty good for a 100 year old house 

sev112

Looks great

i had a quote last year from the Council’s local supplier for panels and battery(s).

I asked for the Batteries to not be in the loft, and to be either on our external wall or inside our adjacent garage.  they tried to do that, said it would cost a fortune, that I would need to get in a builder for various things and then said no.  I said it was a fire risk and then if nolofts went into design codes then houses might not get is unable.  They said unlikely to codify non-loft installation of batterie. Any way they said no thanks to me and gave me my £150 deposit back.

in March this year British Standards come out and say don’t put batteries in lofts in the new British Standard!  It will be interesting where the industry goes with this.  

exocet

I had a 6 KW system installed last Feb - no battery. 

Still undecided about battery - I'd save a further 4 units per day average if I went that route. At that rate, I need to look into the Octopus Flux type scheme to buy / sell. 

Total Generation / Consumption for that period looks like this.

https://i.imgur.com/ifLiE3R.jpeg

3.3 MW/h "saved" - difference between Generated and Exported figure = £890 @ average KW/h unit charge of 27p 


5 MW/h exported @ 15p per unit = £750.

Weather's not as good this year!

DuploLicks

Thanks @Dontgiveupyourdayjob ! Really interesting to see it’s going. I hope our ‘heatwave’ is addressing some of the poor performance to date.