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Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2022 10:54 pm
by Oldgreybeard
Forecast here is for bright sunshine all day tomorrow, and ofr the whole time that our PV array gets any sun (roughly 10am to 2:30pm qt this time of year, because of the local horizon over the opposite side of our valley). With luck it may be the first day in a while where the battery gets topped up for free and we get a free hot water charge.

Mind you, it's well below freezing right now, and forecast to drop to -5 deg by the early hours, so it may take some time for the frost to melt from the panels, and right now the heat pump is running flat out at around 800W pumping heat into the floor, using battery power from last night, still.

Looking forward to not having to reply so much on grid power, though, with luck we might get away with only importing around 5kWh tomorrow night, rather than the ~20kWh we have been importing for the past couple of nights.

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 7:00 am
by NikoV6
Was bright sunshine here all day yesterday too, generated 18.4kw but used 29.2Kw :x

ASHP trying to keep 1850 welsh cottage warm at about 1.5 - 3kw an hour!

Looks like we may have another sunny one today though :mrgreen:

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 8:12 am
by pudding
Thank god for that, will take the edge off the bill. Had our most use yesterday of the year of just under 40kWh :( Nice big fire last night in the log burner which we didn't have the evening before, has already meant our GSHP didn't have to work as hard this morning to get the house temps back up, so that combined with the sunshine today and hopefully back under 30kWh easily today.

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 8:17 am
by Moxi
NikoV6

Where abouts are you roughly? we have an 1890's cottage in Gwynedd and are 300m above sea level just south of Caernarfon looking over the bae with the Llyn to the south and Mon to the North, on a clear day we can see the Cork mountains 56 miles away over the Irish sea.

Sun hasn't arrived yet but theres a clear sky and a promising glow starting to appear behind Wyddfa (Snowden)

Moxi

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 9:43 am
by NikoV6
Moxi wrote: Thu Dec 15, 2022 8:17 am NikoV6

Where abouts are you roughly? we have an 1890's cottage in Gwynedd and are 300m above sea level just south of Caernarfon looking over the bae with the Llyn to the south and Mon to the North, on a clear day we can see the Cork mountains 56 miles away over the Irish sea.

Sun hasn't arrived yet but theres a clear sky and a promising glow starting to appear behind Wyddfa (Snowden)

Moxi
We are at about 220m south facing and have a cracking view down the valley to llansantffraed, we can see Rodney's pillar (oh err mrs) and criggion quarry and on a good day Shrewsbury :D

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 10:23 am
by Oldgreybeard
2.3kW of generation and climbing, pretty much perfect PV conditions, still -3°C outside, panels are very cold but now clear and the sun's slowly coming around to be face on to them by around 2pm. Almost certainly going to be the best day of the month for generation so far, might even have some spare to put into the car later.

Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 10:54 am
by nowty
More power from solar coming in today than required by the house including the GSHP heating in mid December. :mrgreen:
Storage heaters boosted overnight and EV finally up to 80% even with the bonus 3hrs extra on Monday.

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Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 4:45 pm
by NikoV6
Good day today, even like this first thing we're doing 2.5kw!
20.3kw total generation

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Re: Deep joy and bliss!

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 6:25 pm
by Oldgreybeard
Going to be good here again tomorrow, although the forecast is for it to get down to -5°C again overnight. Temperature here is plummeting, I walked back from the village about half an hour ago and it's freezing hard, not helped by a burst water pipe that's created about a 4 inch thick layer of ice over the lane (this will be the water main that Wessex Water deny all knowledge of).

It's already -2°C outside, but I think we may well get away without the heating, as the house is sat at at a slightly too warm 24°C at the moment, due to my over-enthusiastic use of the excess PV generation to run the heat pump earlier and put too much heat into the floor. I hate it when this happens, as it usually takes a couple of days for the house to stabilise back at the 21.5°C to 22°C that we like to keep it at.

Another nasty side effect is that the RH has dropped - right now it's 28% indoors and we've both had dry eyes and stuffy noses, and I had a nosebleed earlier. I've ordered some bits to make a humidifier to fit into the MVHR fresh air ducting (on the room supply side), plus a stand alone humidifier as an interim to see if that get's the humidity back to a comfortable level. We have bowls of warm water around, with towels draped into them,, to try and get the humidity back up, but they aren't having much effect yet. I think the humidity problem is the combination of the long spell of cold weather condensing out the moisture in the air as frost, plus the added drying effect of the MVHR, especially when we've been running the MVHR heat pump.