New to this and looking for advice please

[JohnW]

Excellent, thanks Nowty.

Moxi, yep a grim old day. My weather station tells me the 'feels like' temperature hasn't risen above 13 degrees today, but the bar's rising rapidly, so hopefully a pleasant evening and better day tomorrow. At least all the rain has filled my wildlife pond that was looking more like a bog. Every silver lining has a cloud

[Oldgreybeard]

My initial concern was much the same when first looking at installing a battery system, in that I was convinced that we'd need a big inverter. We have a couple of big built-in ovens plus an induction hob that is rated at 6kW, so I was anticipating that we would need a battery inverter that could deliver far more than 3kW.

As it has turned out, well over a year later, we could get by with a bit less than 3kW inverter rating. We've been in the "switch things on when the sun's shining" mentality for around a decade now, and the reality is much as Stinsy said earlier, the peak power drawn by an oven or the induction hob, is very brief and therefore uses bugger all energy. It's been months since we used more than 2kWh of peak time grid power in a month, and I can live with around 62p worth of peak rate electricity each month.

We have been using a few kWh of off-peak electricity when the weather is cloudy, but not a lot, and I don't fret too much about off-peak usage as it's usually pretty low carbon as well as being cheaper. Main issue this month has been that we've been able to charge the battery enough but have struggled on a few days to also get the hot water heated. The performance of the PV system in the hot spell was well down, enough to get me concerned that there was something awry. Today we saw peaks of well over 6kW though, so that proved the system is OK and it was just the heat hitting the performance hard a week ago.