PSspread-tee wrote: ↑Fri May 19, 2023 5:30 pm Having been live now for nearly four months it seems timely to add a progress update, if any of you are still awake
In early Feb the woodstore/shed array was connected, 6 of Canadian solar 410W panels.
This shows the steel sections Mr Smegal sold to me bolted onto concrete post stubs supporting a pair of 4*2 timber rails onto which the 2+2 timber brackets are fixed which incline at about 15 degrees.
When the batteries were first connected they were at about 65%SOC, this rapidly plummeted to 20% when the inverter shut them down, occasionally we charged them up to maybe 45% ish only for them to fall back to 20%. as yet we dont have a cheap rate.
Near the end of Feb the second array up on the lofty roof went live which seemed to bring the SOC up to 60% plus by sundown. We still drained them down to 20 overnight. Around the second week of March we finally hit the 100% mark and bar a couple of days that is where they have stayed.
Mrs Desp is very good at timing her laundry and etc to coincide with good generation, but to be honest for the last month we have had power to spare all the time. So far we have generated 1127 kWhr and exported just shy of 400kWhrs, hopefully when Octopus have installed a new meter we can persuade them to pay us for some of it.
The Canadian Solar panels supplied by Bimble certainly do what it says on the tin, they are rated at 4.92kWp and yet I have on a few occasions seen more than 5.1kW output which did surprise me. The previous system never reached even 80% of the nameplate capacity, mind you they were cheapo sale items from the other place, so no beef with that. We obviously need to use more power locally so maybe I will build an electrolysis plant, or an Arc furnace, especially if as some of you have said these last couple of months have been pretty poor. Next winter though we will play more extensively with the A/A heatpump so that could be interesting.
Enough for now, seeya.
Desp
I forgot to say I logged on to the UKPN website to find out all the required info for a G98 application, it all seemed simple enough a few photos under the stairs of the cutout, emergency switch, and a few other bits n bobs, a hand drawn line layout showing the switches, and a site plan. all uploaded on their form. Hey presto 10 mins later an E-mail to say all approved They just need a commissioning certificate WTF that is?? So brownie points to UKPN