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Hi all,

I've spent a while lurking on this forum whilst I was getting my self-installed solar & battery setup working, but I thought I'd finally join in properly!

In terms of my setup, I have 10 x 405w panels sitting on a wooden mounting structure which is attached to my garage. Unfortunately my house roof orientation is just not great, plus diy installation at that height didn't appeal!

The garage roof pitch is north facing, so the wooden frame allows me to mount the panels due south at 5 degree pitch.



As the second picture suggests, shading is a given in the early morning and late afternoon from October and will be until March, so most generation is during the noon period.
This is all coupled to a Solis 3.6kw hybrid with 3 x Pylontech US3000C, also located in the garage.
So far, the setup has worked really well with much lower costs due to the diy install!

I have spent a lot of time on the control and monitoring through modbus, home assistant and lots of data investigation, so I'm hoping to share this with the forum in case others could benefit.

Looking forward to being an active member and learning more!

Welcome onboard MrPablo!

Welcome, another Home Assistant fan here. I'm pulling data from our battery inverter using an ESP8266, connected to the RS485/Modbus port and using MQTT to get it via WiFi to Home Assistant (running on a Raspberry Pi).

Hi and welcome,

With the shading issues you mention have you looked at optimisers such as Tigo?

I did have several Tigo optimisers on order from Voltacon but cancelled it after viewing the MPPT voltage & current data from the inverter.
The majority of the time, the MPPT pulls the voltage down and the shaded sections of the panels get bypassed anyway.

Instead, I'm thinking of buying some additional panels to mount on the south facing gable wall, so the cash will be needed for that!

MrPablo wrote: ↑Mon Oct 17, 2022 5:09 pm I did have several Tigo optimisers on order from Voltacon but cancelled it after viewing the MPPT voltage & current data from the inverter.
The majority of the time, the MPPT pulls the voltage down and the shaded sections of the panels get bypassed anyway.

Instead, I'm thinking of buying some additional panels to mount on the south facing gable wall, so the cash will be needed for that!

Yes, my SMA inverter does shade management by doing an occasional global peak MPPT scan. If your inverter does this and your panels are the same and facing the same direction (like yours), then TIGOs don't add much value. But if your adding mismatched panels or panels facing a different direction then TIGOs are superior.

Quite a nice looking array you have too.

If anyone complains they are more than 200mm higher than the roof, you say, they are the roof.

Well done MrPablo. It looks great. If the frame of each PV panel stands 2 or 3mm proud of the glass, which is usually the case, then at 5 degrees slope water will sit at the bottom of the slope, leading to a build-up of dirt and alga eventually. This affects output but it looks as though you can easily reach to clean with an extending pole and soft buffer.

Yep, I've got the long pole on standby for cleaning duty! I would have liked more of a pitch, but so far they seem to drain pretty well.

Nowty, that's exactly my viewpoint, plus if there's ever an official issue, I'll just reroof the garage with a pitched roof that's suspiciously similar in profile...

Welcome to the forum!

Im sure theres room for a "waffer thin" (small) ladder, step variety under there nowty