Comparing solar immersion heater diverters (water heating).

[ChrisJEvans]

Is there a round up anywhere of the pro's and cons of:
solarimmersion, eddi, solic-200 & solar-iboost (Any others available in the u.k.?)

https://myenergi.com/product/eddi/
https://solarimmersion.co.uk/shop/solar ... y-manager/
https://www.earthwiseproducts.co.uk/solic-200/
https://www.marlec.co.uk/product/solar-iboost/

I will be adding batteries to the systems when I can lay my hands on some!

So far I've concluded being able to set the export threshold seems important in some setups.

All info very gratefully received.

[Stinsy]

Solic is cheap and cheerful. Won't last forever but DIY repairable.

Eddi is as good as it gets, integrates nicely with the BEV charging point from the same manufacturer.

iBoost is exceptionally expensive for what is a very simple device.

(I don't know anything about the "solarimmersion".)

[Oldgreybeard]

I've had two, an Apollo Gem, worked fine, but wouldn't play nicely with the battery system, so I replaced it with an Eddi. The Eddi is brilliant, has a great deal of useful functionality, including the ability to use more than one CT, and the ability to connect it to different types of monitoring systems. Nicely made, too, and has the option to connect CTs wirelessly with a Harvi module.

[ecogeorge]

Solic +1
No fancy display (would be nice to see output) but I believe its the only one that diverts down to zero watts? am I correct .....
George

[chris_n]

I had a lot of problems getting a Solic wireless to commission, managed eventually. I am no longer in the country and my daughter is unable to get it to working again having had it switched off.

[Oldgreybeard]

Solic +1
No fancy display (would be nice to see output) but I believe its the only one that diverts down to zero watts? am I correct .....
George

The Eddi has a variable threshold, that can be set using the menu. No problem with setting it to zero. I had the Sofar set with a 100W CT offset and the Eddi set to zero, so most of the time the Eddi starts to charge the thermal battery before the Sofar. This mostly works to allow the hot water to charge first, but is very far from being perfect, as the two devices have a different response time.

When I get around to it I want to use ESPNow and Home Assistant to control the Sofar, rather than just take data from it, so I can force it to not charge until after the hot water has charged. The reasoning behind that is that the round trip loss from the PV system to the thermal battery is a fair bit lower than the round trip loss through the Sofar and battery and back again. On marginal days it seems to make sense to heat the hot water first, then top the battery up if there is any left over generation, rather than the other way around.

[Swwils]

The eddi is not worth the money

[Gareth J]

Mk2 PV router is an option I'd like to try.

Have both iboosts and solics here. I used to think I'd miss the visual output of the iboost (when switching over to a solic) but in reality, so long as it's doing it's thing and the waters hot, that's all that matters.

The solic is quite electrically noisy.

[Tinbum]

I did a home made version of the pv router and expanded it to cover ASHP's as well. I've now adapted it to run on my grid frequency and added mqqt WiFi sockets and control with node red. Works brilliantly

[Jinx]

I’m on a general, non-renewable specific Electrician group on fb and the reports of problems from myenergi gear is worrying. Granted the others are much less well known so it maybe a case of you only hear of popular products failing but there is also reports of poor tech support. Make of that what you will.