Inheriting a challenge

Hmmm, interesting. I might try to do that. It'll be tough in terms of actually wiring the CTs through to the Eddi (its actually a floor above the Harvi and across two rooms) but if that worked it would be nice. I'll try to check the inverter at the weekend even though that involves a lot of crawling.

For (3) I'm not convinced (yet!) that its just lag. It often misses a kettle being on, and frequently under-reports whats on the Eddi by 2 - 3x, even when power usage is stable in the evening with just freezers, TV, computers on. I'll keep an eye. But no, I don't actually trust the readings reported by Eddi and the app at all anymore. Which worries me.... if Eddi is correctly reporting the PV power generation, and underestimating the load for whatever reason, will it unknowingly pull the balance of power from the grid to heat the hot water because it thinks there is an excess available, when in reality there isn't?

Edit: I might try changing the channels too, see if that helps. Not QUITE confident enough with the system yet, as we don't have the installers to rely on to fix things if we buggered it up, because they have gone completely non contact.

Thanks a mil. The CT clamp is around two cables at the moment. Both are positive and the arrow points to the fuseboxes. We have an odd setup where the meter used to be split on our side of the ESB box, with two seperate meters and two seperate fuseboxes for upstairs and downstairs. Both were combined (bodged together) years ago to power the house as one unit with one new meter but power does flow through both sets of cables. Therefore, our CT clamp is around the positives coming out of both meters, so it should, in theory, read the combined power from the two of them - which would be the total power coming into the house. Fixing the meters is on the cards, someday. I'll hold back on pictures of that setup for now on the offchance the company could see this.

We won't mention that the install put the CT in the wrong way, and on the wrong cable altogether.

I don't know the system well enough to know what the Harvi is actually doing, but I'll check.

Dropped signal all day long today as well. Really frustrating.

We'll see if we can do that. Oddly enough I don't think its catching the oven being on as it stands.

I'm away tomorrow but back Friday and will have a look at the inverter then. Fingers crossed theres something obvious wrong with it!!!

In the end the signal was dropped all day but oddly enough came back at roughly the same power level that it went off at, which strikes me as a coincidence. Can the inverter get too hot and just stop working? Its in the attic but it does get hot up there.

So we've had an electrician look at the meter, and he has disconnected the second redundant meter completely so only one cable flows "in" to the fuseboards. He then proceeded to put the CT on the wrong way around so we have fixed that.

Trouble is, things are now worse.

1) There is still the problem of everything dropping to 0 on various days... seemingly sunny ones. Both the app and the Eddi show 0 0 0 for everything as below. It seems to occur roughly from 9 to 5 which tells me it is a heat related issue somewhere. The inverter has two lights on it during this time - the wifi light is off. When the system is "working" (I use that phrase lightly) the wifi light is flickering as you'd expect for wi-fi. Is it actually a connection problem between the inverter and whatever it communicates with? I don't know. I don't know what is the master system that sends data to the internet. I THINK it is the inverter, but then regardless of what eddi shows, the app will still show imported electricity usage even during this time where connection is (seemingly) lost. So something is exporting data to the internet.

2) After the electrician came, the Eddi is now not reading anything from the CT - which means it does not know we have an excess so won't try to heat hot water. (This is aside from the fact that the app correctly reads electricity usage now). We haven't managed to connect the Eddi directly to the CT yet... I'm reluctant to go digging too much until the installers look at the system again. But of course I don't know if/when they are going to come.

Its just been an absolute disaster start to finish. Seven weeks now. I KNOW the system is good... when it works. But it just isn't working and god knows what stress adding a battery will give us. It is now to the point of causing arguments in the house as three people - two elderly - try to understand whats going on with a company who, although very good initially, now just simply will not return any phonecalls.

I'll keep you guys updated.

Edit: The Energy Flow on the app/website is working correctly and displaying everything (import/useage/PV) but the Eddi shows PV/usage only - and those numbers are always the same - but no import.

Not sure anyone is following this still, but we have some resolutions.

1) The previous electrician pulled a wire by accident resulting in one of the CTs not being plugged in correctly. To be honest we should have seen this.

2) The current electrician thinkg that the sudden drop to 0 of the PV is actually caused by the voltage and/or current being too high on the ESB end and spiking. It trips out when it thinks its too high, and then comes back on again later in the day. He's upped the threshold where it triggers but it is still happening occasionally. With us out in the country in Galway and several milking machines on the lines I can see where that might happen. On the down side, ESB really aren't interested in doing anything about it. That might have to be pursued.

Yes, it is. That was due to a loose connection where one of the CTs comes in, apparently.

The remaining problem is that the PV output drops to 0 somewhat randomly, usually on nice days. It just drops to 0, no PV is generated at all, the Eddi reads 0 for generated. The electrician suspects this is surges coming from the ESB side... but there hasn't been any damage that I'm aware of to any electrical equipment over the years so I dunno.

Its better than it was, but not QUITE there yet.

I'll check that out, and see what can be done. Thanks.

In the app, the AC Output of the Inverter is 251.8V at the moment. Thats all I have for now!

Been ok for a few days but now the voltage issue is happening again. Its really annoying.

A nice day of lovely weather and what do you know... PV power drops out at about 9am and we have to import everything.

Does anyone know when the inverter will start working again? Does the voltage have to drop to a certain value before it does, or can we reset the inverter to make it try again?

Our "stable" voltage during the day is about 252V at the ESB end, which is outrageous.

sigh

Three of the last four days now we have had overvoltage tripping that takes the PV offline for hours at a time. Sat/Sun aren't so bad as people are home and are loading the system, thereby reducing the voltage.

ESB were rung, and said our voltages are between about 240 and 253V. They don't need to monitor it, as they are happy with our own monitoring. They said they can't do anything unless the installers call them, and it turns out the installers had never sent in the forms to ESB saying that solar was put in. So it was news to them!

The installers said they won't call ESB under GDPR. Nonsense of the highest order. They promised a callback first thing this morning, nothing. Looks like this is going to drag to Tuesday after the bank holiday. Its just going on and on. Has anyone had any luck getting these voltage issues sorted?

If the company won't budge I'm tempted to just go up to the inverter and raise the cutoff voltage myself.