Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Is your PV solar array generating more

Tim, we hit 12.9 kWh yesterday. Last year we hit the 20s by 21/3 with 21.9 kWh. The biggest daily amount was 27.3 kWh in late May.
We have a directly south facing 3.9 kW array. Spare electricity heats our hot water before being fed to the grid. I'll look again at batteries in a few years.

Number quoted are off the Ginlong Solis bluetooth monitor I have on the inverter.The meter reads slightly differently.

The running daily average based upon the bluetooth monitor, but adjusted to the meter quarterly when I claim the FIT, is 11.14 kWh after 760 days operating.

Yesterday we generated 8.68kw, the second highest this year.
Total production so far this year is 142kw.
I've got quotes for an additional Pythontech battery, £1500 inc vat and fitting.
The inverter can take 8 x 3kw batteries, should we ever need/want to do that.

In 2018, before we had a battery, we used 8323kw of electricity.
In 2020 with battery and iboost we used 7025kw
Saving 1298kw, or £205.00 per year on our present tarif. So the pat back on the additional battery would be at at least 7 years.
So I think we shall forget the additional battery.
Electricity prices would have to rocket to make it a 5 year ROI.

There's a reasonable chance of this, I think.

Current electricity prices are unsustainably low, which is why so many small suppliers go out of business, they lack the income to withstand wholesale price fluctuations.

With so many power plants (half the existing nukes will be gone by 2024) going off line due to age and insufficient baseload capacity being built to replace, I think it's inevitable that prices will rise quite significantly over the next few years in order to pay for more nukes to be built. EDF is not making any profits at all from its nuclear operations, it's kept afloat by renewables which although give good profitability margins, aren't brilliant at providing baseload.

Interesting to see another option to conventional batteries, although the efficiency is a killer - more likely to be built at industrial scale by companies like Siemens for the energy suppliers I suspect!
https://newatlas.com/energy/lavo-home-hydrogen-battery-storage/

PS: I suspect the UK will be keeping the French nuclear industry in business for the next 20 years!

As you say, interesting, but a way to go yet with the development. Still, that's the great thing about green technology development, it is advancing in leaps and bounds. It wasn't so long ago that people were scoffing at the idea that renewables would ever be able to produce significant power at competitive rates, and now it's a major contributor to our energy mix.

Here's a couple of graphs showing the benefit of having battery storage for your home solar array. The first is one of our systems yesterday, 4.8KW panels, 7 KWh battery, serving the higher demand side of the house. The red is power we've used from the grid, the green is power we've generated off the panels, and the blue is power we've used that we generated ourselves either direct from the panels or via the battery. The only gap we had was from 04:00 to 08:00 and those spikes in the middle of the night are the greenhouse heaters kicking in as it was a chilly night.



The second graph is from the other system which supplies the lower demand half of the house. Another 4.8KW array/7KWh battery and as you can see it covered practically all consumption apart from when we needed more than the battery and panels could provide as the battery has a maximum discharge rate of 3KW

We generated 16kwh on Friday and Saturday, which is more than we used.

The Government will ban the sale of non electric/hybrid cars from 2030, just when half the nuclear power baseload will have been decommissioned. Joined up planning?

Yes, butt joint. Guess who the butts are.

Yes, it's interesting how the logic changes when one is on a decent FiT contract like yourselves. If you earn more for the electricity you export than you pay for what you import it makes perfect sense to minimise consumption. But for folks like us with no earnings from export, the key is to maximise the consumption of generated power.

We're quite heavy users of electricity in comparison to you which is why we went for a largeish array. From midnight on Thursday to midnight on Saturday we generated a total of 67KWh over the 48 hours and managed to use 65KWh of it.