Solar PV Hints, Tips & Troubleshooting

Has anyone managed to fix the Solis hybrid grid import when it shouldn't be? Their 20ms response time claims are major BS.

Got it updated to 3A0029 and it didn't fix a thing.

Quite annoying actually as it can draw up to 1kwh per day (and I get that if it the load is greater than 6kw it will pull from grid but these are times when it is less) and it shouldn't have drawn anything from the grid since Wed last week.

It doesn't even detect it, I can only see this via my shelly on the mains or at the meter

Any settings that might need tweaking to improve the responsiveness?

Well when the house load is idling it stays pretty stable (as you can see at night for example) so it doesn't continuously add 30w for example.

It only jumps when the load goes up and down so it is related. It's probably higher than that for sure since I have it set to 30 sec updates and confirmed at the meter as well.

Also pretty obvious on the bills, the solis always underestimates, could be 50kws or more that it doesn't see.

I have to say, the Sofar ME3000 reacts pretty quickly. I do find that even with a constant generation and house load, when the MyEnergi Eddi is running, I get a lot of export on my MyEnergi app graphs

You are averaging only 250w per hour. You won't do much better I would have thought.

3kw sounds perhaps a little excessive to me. I have 8x outside lights (6watts each) on overnight, 2x fridges, a freezer, 5x wireless extenders / router and at this time of year I'm doing ~1.5kw overnight.

One thing I discovered when trying to root out high energy stuff was that older electronics can draw a lot on standby. Worst offender was my old Technics music system - was pulling 15watts on standby!

Another high load device was my NAS - ~60watts - that's now on a timer and switches off at 11PM and back on at 8AM.

I'd recommend to get one of the plug in power monitors and go around and find out what everything is using on standby etc. Worth the 10 euro imo.

But, from 8PM onwards you have TV on till what time? My TV is modern 49" LED and it uses ~100watts turned on. I had to turn off the 'eco' mode as it made the TV unwatchable but that drove the power up.

Also, you sure no one is boiling kettles for tea / coffee etc after 8PM? Toaster?

Do you have any pumped water systems? I noticed at a friend of mines house his pump was going on every 20 seconds - he had a couple of leaking taps and toilets and that was making the pump run a lot more than it should.

Yeah definitely need to get plug monitor and suss out.

Have you a sky box with the telly?

Gamed console/dvd player on standby?

Alexa/google devices?

You'd be surprised how they all add up.

It's annoying the way the digital meters have round numbers rather than decimal places. So it's impossible to look at usage hour by hour.

If you have solar, which also monitors the house load, and has a live feed, then you could watch the load as devices are turned on of off, one by one

Very true, alll the standby usage never bothered me before. Now with solar it's become a challenge to maximise self sufficiency, so identifying what uses what over the next few weeks and hopefully lowering the base load (around 350-400w) is the next task. Even knocking 30w per hour off it would lower the yearly usage by around 260kWh, -> €1 a week saving.

What makes you not believe that it's telling the truth ?

Just trying to understand why this started happening all of a sudden. It sorted itself out around 7pm but lost a few hours from midday.

I'm still in my first year with a 5kw battery (good guess!) And I don't want to comment too often, but since you mention it....

I notice my 5kw battery tends to charge and discharge 9Kw on a good sunny day like yesterday. In my mind this means I am cycling it twice and really getting value out of it.

If I was to overbuild a battery I might be happy seeing it store energy rather than watch it go to grid.... but that every extra Kw I add to battery comes at a cost out of my pocket that needs to be clawed back from my savings. At 10cents night rate that's a long time to claw back!

I am starting to think that an 8 or 10 Kw battery, if I am still able to cycle it 2x per day might be a sweet spot for my house.

Either way I'm still good with waiting until the world settles down on the supply chain side of things. One thing I am glad is I added a 5kw battery and did not add a 2.5kw or even leave it out as MANY people were advising at the time!

It would make me consider adding a second string on the north facing side of my roof. The slope is about 22° so gets any sunshine from late Feb to late Oct