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Biggest you can install and finance. More is simply more. The bigger you go, the more you save more of the year. A big part of the cost is scaffold and paying people to organise and turn up. Each panel is only £140ish - incremental cost to upsizing is tiny, adding later will re-incur all those base costs.I am thinking to pull the trigger on Solar installation. I will get some estimators coming later this week
my roof is east / west.
we both work from home most of the days (wife is always WFH) and she loves to run washing machine/dryer (sometimes both at the same time) during the day
what you guys think is the best capacity, including battery, to install??
10 panels east + 10 panels west?
not much, really.As many panels as you can fit/afford, I’d say.
Battery storage is trickier as it’s unlikely to have a ROI (electricity prices won’t stay this high for very long), so it kinda boils down to how much you value energy security and the “smug factor”
Add in the ability to use cheap rate power to fill the battery in the winter and the payoff is around the same as time as panels. For me that is currently about 6 years, will be less if power costs go up as predicted in the next 6 months. But it depends on your usage (ie I'm on electric heat pump for all heating needs). Time to break out excel I'm afraid!not much, really.
I checked and my power bills now are at ~80, depending on charges a month. It will be ~1k a year. so 10 k installation is >10 years pay off.
I just wonder if battery is really worth it.
Also, to be fair I've not calculated how they interact with gas heating at all if you are still using that...Add in the ability to use cheap rate power to fill the battery in the winter and the payoff is around the same as time as panels. For me that is currently about 6 years, will be less if power costs go up as predicted in the next 6 months. But it depends on your usage (ie I'm on electric heat pump for all heating needs). Time to break out excel I'm afraid!
my roof is east / west
enough battery storage to get you from ‘end of solar day’ to ‘start of off peak period’.
what you guys think is the best capacity
This is a late reply, but it might help. I installed a CT onto my Andersen to use up excess solar. It works pretty well, but it can be a bit slow to react on days where there is partial cloud cover (the inverter is probably as much to blame here). That means that (assuming you have a home battery) you will find occasions where it drags some power off the battery to meet the car charging demands. There is a way to force it to add grid power when the solar drops, but that defeats the purpose.That crimp tool out the whole damn network, just plugging it into the powered down network .
The Andersen has an Advanced Solar option in beta that I'm going to investigate. Otherwise I'll take back manual control and just choose to charge at a limited rate for a few hours. But that sucks.
I have a similar view - some degree of energy independence being the 'gain'.In terms of ROI my view is:
If you are old enough that likely to be in your current house into retirement then installing PV / Battery is basically locking in the price of X% of your annual electricity (at today's PV / Battery prices). So you won't have to pay that X% to Utility Company in future.
No idea if Electricity price will go up or down - down seems unlikely to me, but anything could happen - but either way I'm more than happy that I no longer pay some 80% of my electricity bill
. I installed a CT onto my Andersen to use up excess solar. It works pretty well, but it can be a bit slow to react on days where there is partial cloud cover (the inverter is probably as much to blame here). That means that (assuming you have a home battery) you will find occasions where it drags some power off the battery to meet the car charging demands. There is a way to force it to add grid power when the solar drops, but that defeats the purpose.
Cheers both. Annoyingly we are away with the car these couple of weeks when the panels have been pumping out masses of excess power. But, when back home I'm leaning towards a manual process too.This is where I am at too.
I installed a Zappi assuming I would just "allow any excess to charge the car".
In practice the right car (the one most empty / most needing miles "soon") needs to be attached to the Zappi (other charger is an old Tesla charger), that involves a driveway car-shuffle.
And then the business of overriding overnight schedule and remembering to re-engage it before a trip. Forgetting to enable means having to then stop and supercharge ... forgetting to disable overnight schedule means the car then charges overnight - costs me some money and then the car is full so no capacity to fill up with PV tomorrow ... all 1st world problems of course
I think it would be better if the car said that it wanted to charge, rather than the wall charger controlling that. Wall charger has no idea which car is plugged in / having the greater need for charging (going somewhere soon / lower SOC / Some other criteria)
I'm currently solving this by:
Plug both cars into wall chargers - both enabled to "charge" (rather than being in Eco+ Mode)
Leave the overnight Scheduled charge in place (for when I do want it)
Drop the LIMIT to 50% at the end of the solar-day (unless I want an overnight charge)
(I've set a TeslaFi Schedule @ 16:00 in case I forget; therefore I have to explicitly increase LIMIT on the few occasions when I actually want an overnight charge)
When PV generation is high then increase the LIMIT and START CHARGE
Adjust the AMPS according to how much PV I have (midday has loads, end-of-day when the PowerWalls become full will be 5AMPs - just enough to stop Exporting)
The above would be pretty ease to do in Software, I haven't found an existing solution, nor the time to create one (if anyone is interested speak up, it would be more worthwhile if there were any other takers)
One of my considerations is that the PowerWalls will charge at around 3kW on off peak (a rate that I read as "best for battery longevity"), but when PV is generating at full whack the PowerWalls don't max out until 10kW - a rate that is probably not good for them.
So I would prefer to charge the car at at least 16AMPs when PowerWall charging goes over, say, 7kW ... rather than "Fill PowerWalls flat out, then use Wall Charger CT to detect export and divert to car"
I'm also east and west but for two flat roof areas - for me it will give a better spread throughout the day, rather than a high midday peak.I am thinking to pull the trigger on Solar installation. I will get some estimators coming later this week
my roof is east / west.
we both work from home most of the days (wife is always WFH) and she loves to run washing machine/dryer (sometimes both at the same time) during the day
what you guys think is the best capacity, including battery, to install??
10 panels east + 10 panels west + 8 kwh battery?
Agree completely - it's not the max you are buying for, it extending the useful generation as far into the shoulder seasons as possible you are buying for.. I realise this is going to be above my inverter max output and it'll get "clipped" however for the rest of the time/year I'll be generating more overall so I think it's worth it. The panels after all are not particularly expensive.
The DNO's are an absolute pain in the a**e, it's no wonder installers want to stay under the 3.68 limit.I've also recently pulled the trigger on solar, hopefully getting installed in 3 weeks time. I'm fortunate enough to have quite a large (almost) directly South-facing roof even so when I started getting quotes almost everyone was coming back suggesting 8-12 panels. It seems the installers are really trying to stick under the 3.68kw limit to avoid a DNO application. As others have suggested I want to max the system out so I persevered, had some installers just stop speaking to me, but now have 20 panels being installed for somewhere around 8kw total. I realise this is going to be above my inverter max output and it'll get "clipped" however for the rest of the time/year I'll be generating more overall so I think it's worth it. The panels after all are not particularly expensive.
Battery storage I think is entirely down to your household usage. I worked out that I needed somewhere around 14kwh of storage to maximise how much of our own solar we could use in the house, however with a couple of cars I can also dump excess power into I've gone for 10kwh of battery initially.
The thing is if enough people on a street submit 3.68kw notifications, whether they end up installing it or not, the DNO can't refuse these by law and the cost of any infrastructure upgrade falls to the DNO. Just saying...There is no joined up thinking - how the net zero will ever be achieved when there are so many restrictions in place by the DNO's - and if there is an upgrade required on the infrastructure somewhere - they want the individual customer to pay for it!
I'm starting to play with this too. First step is installing a Shelly EM with CT clamps to start collecting usage data for the whole house, then I can write some code or IFTTT type functions to manipulate where any excess power will be diverted - looking to manage it between the house battery, immersion, and two cars.Cheers both. Annoyingly we are away with the car these couple of weeks when the panels have been pumping out masses of excess power. But, when back home I'm leaning towards a manual process too.
I think to stop the battery contributing, I need to set it to charge mode, at whatever %its at, then the Andersen solar mode will take care of charging. I think I'll leave the car set to over night charging, but manually initiate a charge when needed.
I need to run the faffing around a few times manually to work out the algo I want, and will then slowly pick bits to automate as best I can. So many different bits of tech involved I'm worried I'm going to need some kind of windows GUI automation solution with a virtual phone running some of the apps. Only the Tesla really has a proper API access .