Balcony solar PV

[Joeboy]

I have the hoymiles 800W bookmarked now on Amazon. Racking my brain to think if I did anything wrong but nothing coming up.

Strange one though, hooked it up at no1's and got a steady red light (should flash red blue the solid blue).

Brought it back over here after belling through cables and on hook up it tripped a breaker in the CU. Assuming internal fault. Won't know until I open it up but not doing that until I hear/not hear from the supplier. Fingers crossed.

On the upside, we can find out if Alixexpress warranty is any .

[Tay]

It has been withdrawn from UK sale as it isn't compliant. I read somewhere (maybe even on here) that they are working on a solution. If you follow their links to balcony solar on their UK website it has the rest of the kit (panels, flat cable etc and the battery that they call a generator) minus the grid inverter. The inverter shows on the website but shows no stock.

I've gone down a similar route using Bluetti gear, atm I'm charging a battery during cheap periods 9p/kw and discharging during peak. It also acts as a UPS too, it takes dual PV inputs (with limitations) and it kinda portable (I say kinda because it weighs a ton !!!) .

Charge at night, discharge during peak and supplemented with PV, If the battery gets to 10% then the mains fills in covering the IT gear and at midnight it charges to full etc. Not got another battery yet but that would cover my entire office for the day (excluding PV), the Invertor is a 3Kw unit so could be up for delivering quite a bit of power to the house.

I've a flat roof that I've just purchased a couple of 295W Perlight panels for and when it stops raining I'll endeavour to get up there and fit it all to a frame I'm building in the garage.

The BIG issue of these units when connecting to PV is that whilst mine supports 2400w input, the input voltage is up to 150v but the current is a mere 12A's - I had illusions of sticking some mighty large panels on the flat roof to supplement the power during the day, scuppered.

The total PV input for my unit is a lot more than the ECO flow if I recall, I was looking at the Ecoflow Delta Pro with a spare battery but got dissuaded by the high fan noise people reported and the lower PV input, I never got as far as checking the V and A inputs.

Will Prowse likes both units, the App's seem to leave a bit to be desired but I guess its early days with this type of stuff.

Both Bluetti and Ecoflow have or at least 'had' some sort of electrical panel that essentially can supply power to the entire house (or selected circuits) in the case of an outage or simply to save money. That 'was' going to be my next logical step after testing this gear.

[Tay]

I'll leave this here, a lot of clever design for £155?

Although, bottom right 'caution' Hilarious! Beats the hell out of my Cantonese or Mandarin.

I must admit having lived in Asia for 25 years seeing a Chinese product carrying a counterfeiting notice I may have snorted a little.

[Joeboy]

I'll leave this here, a lot of clever design for £155?

Although, bottom right 'caution' Hilarious! Beats the hell out of my Cantonese or Mandarin.

I must admit having lived in Asia for 25 years seeing a Chinese product carrying a counterfeiting notice I may have snorted a little.

I used to shop for electronics in Shenzhen when I worked there. About the time the Chinese phone manufacturers stopped imitating and started innovating.

Back then.it was knockoff Samsung & Apple phones, Bluetooth speakers and a lot of optical gear. Could get a cold beer in the shop too. Tsing Tao, loved it!

I have had to resist pushing the buy button on the Hoymiles 800 and just getting on with it! I'll give the supplier a chance to do the right thing, 24hrs. Fingers .

[Tay]

I'll leave this here, a lot of clever design for £155?

Although, bottom right 'caution' Hilarious! Beats the hell out of my Cantonese or Mandarin.

I must admit having lived in Asia for 25 years seeing a Chinese product carrying a counterfeiting notice I may have snorted a little.

I used to shop for electronics in Shenzhen when I worked there. About the time the Chinese phone manufacturers stopped imitating and started innovating.

Back then.it was knockoff Samsung & Apple phones, Bluetooth speakers and a lot of optical gear. Could get a cold beer in the shop too. Tsing Tao, loved it!

I have had to resist pushing the buy button on the Hoymiles 800 and just getting on with it! I'll give the supplier a chance to do the right thing, 24hrs. Fingers .

Sham Shui Po (Golden Arcade) in Hong Kong was my fav, lots of fake gear and software, but some innovation (or perhaps imitation that looked differant) maybe. I loved cutting edge (at the time) brands like ZyXEL modems they were the dogs nuts at the time.

I honestly don't know why the West let it go on for so long, clearly everything and I mean everything that went there to be built got copied, thats when the poor quality started creeping in search of that 10¢'s of profit per item, shame they did it with safety gear too, so much on Amazon being misrepresented as good safe gear when in many case its just a death trap waiting to happen. Anyway, I digress.

I was lucky as my dad was aircrew and I got to go to Japan a lot and those guys knew how to innovate but little of it made it to the west. I think I'd be a bit over whelmed with the gear in China/Japan now.

I must admit the whole micro inverter thing that plugs in to the Mains baffles me, I don't doubt it works, but cant believe I didn't know about it until now.

Given my particular situation with the roof profile this might be an option for the rest of the house. My baseline usage is pretty consistent and I could cover that (Weather permitting of course) fairly cheaply.

The usage excluding my office, is between 185-350w continuously which covers fridge, freezer, standby gear, Sky box, devices scattered around on charge etc

1-2 panels and a fairly low spec, or a decent spec (under utilised) microinvertor might suffice. I presume there is little else do in this situation,
if you over produce tough and if you under use the grid fills in. I'll keep an eye on this thread and see how it all fares.

[Joeboy]

For my 0.19kWh run, it was the best thing ever!

My personal wow place was Futian electronics area in Shenzhen. This market in particular was mindblowing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=futian+ ... afx1O1RVTM

No1 son & I had a couple of weeks in Jspan a few years ago, it was excellent! Osaka, Kyoto, Koyasan & Tokyo. Would go again in a heartbeat to either. Might be heading to Vietnam in Jan.

On the QC side of things, I was kind of half expecting this. A shame the doubts kicked in 2 days after I'd pressed buy button and the unit sat for 5 weeks while I was away! Not heard back yet from supplier but its only 10 hours so far. If I don't hear anything by this afternoon I'll likely open.it up tomorrow and see if there's anything obvious. Thems the breaks I suppose.

The Hoymiles gear has a 12 year warranty but the monitoring software & gear is extra over and above the £250 buy price so I'd likely run it dumb for 6 months to see it stand up first.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hoymiles-HM-80 ... 31c1f06c86

Tay, glad to help raise awareness on these units. There are many variants & ratings. Amazon UK has a load and their returns policy is simple. I'll aim for higher quality next time. Might be worth bearing in mind?

For sheer entertainment and a laugh. Two days after I ordered and the doubt kicked in I found this...
https://wvc-600.com/
20/20 Hindsight eh?
My own fault, got all excited. Thought 'this'll be smashing'. Caveat emptor, a fool and their money etc. I'm gonna take myself outside and give me a good hiding!

[Joeboy]

Second houses count for the secret list.

And if its on order, its going on the list today.

1722 x 1134 x 30 mm, tight but will be fun to mount. Want to help choose a microinverter? Collecting Tuesday evening at 18.00hrs.

I'd probably go with one of the Enphase (good brand) ones from ITS or Tradesparky, rather than an Alliexpress Chinese punt. I'll have a closer look at them soon.

Ahem...

[Joeboy]

Positive, company has replied.
Although I had it working first day on top left connection. It did not work on either top right or bottom right yesterday.

It's good they replied.

[nowty]

1722 x 1134 x 30 mm, tight but will be fun to mount. Want to help choose a microinverter? Collecting Tuesday evening at 18.00hrs.

I'd probably go with one of the Enphase (good brand) ones from ITS or Tradesparky, rather than an Alliexpress Chinese punt. I'll have a closer look at them soon.

Ahem...

One of reasons I initially suggested the Enphase ones was because they are G98 certified, I doubted the Alliexpress ones would be.

I've now checked the Hoymiles ones which your thinking about as a replacement, and they are UK compliant G98 and on the ENA type test register.

[Tay]

For my 0.19kWh run, it was the best thing ever!

My personal wow place was Futian electronics area in Shenzhen. This market in particular was mindblowing.
snipped --

No1 son & I had a couple of weeks in Jspan a few years ago, it was excellent! Osaka, Kyoto, Koyasan & Tokyo. Would go again in a heartbeat to either. Might be heading to Vietnam in Jan.

On the QC side of things, I was kind of half expecting this. A shame the doubts kicked in 2 days after I'd pressed buy button and the unit sat for 5 weeks while I was away! Not heard back yet from supplier but its only 10 hours so far. If I don't hear anything by this afternoon I'll likely open.it up tomorrow and see if there's anything obvious. Thems the breaks I suppose.

The Hoymiles gear has a 12 year warranty but the monitoring software & gear is extra over and above the £250 buy price so I'd likely run it dumb for 6 months to see it stand up first.

Snipped ---

Tay, glad to help raise awareness on these units. There are many variants & ratings. Amazon UK has a load and their returns policy is simple. I'll aim for higher quality next time. Might be worth bearing in mind?

For sheer entertainment and a laugh. Two days after I ordered and the doubt kicked in I found this...
https://wvc-600.com/
20/20 Hindsight eh?
My own fault, got all excited. Thought 'this'll be smashing'. Caveat emptor, a fool and their money etc. I'm gonna take myself outside and give me a good hiding!

Tokyo was my fav place, akihabara is something else.

I watched a lot of vids and looked at a lot of sites after following this thread, I suspect 80-90% of the Microinvertors come from the same place, or perhaps the outside cases do?, seems that design has been around for a while, I saw a YT vid from some guy in the US from about 6-7 years ago, alas, nothing to state he's still do it of course.

I too saw that wvc-600 / wvc-1200 naming convention floating around under different brand names. I found a couple UK based Solar companies that are prepared to put their names on that model so perhaps that is the model to look at.

One I found, I think, was also posted here before earlier in the thread. from Voltacon showing a wvc-1200 and the company offering 10 year warranty, but with a hefty price tag, £330 ish

I'm expecting a little bit of tax free lump sum cash next month so maybe I'll do a bit of speculation and have a look at it.



I found some competitively priced ones early on Amazon earlier, but soemthing just feels off with them ^^ can't quite put my finger on it.