Inheriting a challenge

Update for those interested: The company had offered, very kindly, to put in an extra panel for us for free, as that can be coupled with the three on our side roof on one Inverter string, with our eight other panels on the second string. Its only a 3kW inverter and will have 4.5kW of panels attached to it, so I know we're bottlenecked there a bit.

Installed happily yesterday. But, the installers had problems, as both strings were generating a voltage but not a current. So they need an electrician. No electricians available until next Tuesday, even in an emergency. They can't put the system back to how it was either - with 8+3 all on the one string and the new panel just disconnected, without an electrician.

So entire system switched off until next week. A bit frustrating, but all the installers and electricians are just so busy at the moment.

I dunno what they were up to... the funny thing is it is now trickle charging the battery, so something is on! But nothing coming into the house.

The sun was out and firing in 2kW+ on the day, so I'm not sure. Maybe they didn't wait long enough but unfortunately we'll have to wait until Tuesday at the earliest to find out.

Oh whoops, I realised I never updated this thread.

Everything is going well with the solar, and it is performing FAR better than expected.

To recap:

• March 2022 8x panels and 3kW Huawei Sun2000 inverter installed. Various problems with voltage solved by chance (big explosion at a substation) and by a transformer replacement
• November 2022 3x more panels installed and a 5kW Luna battery installed. Problems accessing FusionHome app to set the battery to charge at night
• January 2022 FusionHome still doesn't work - can't log in, but company told us how to do all this stuff through FusionSolar, so battery charged most nights and monitored manually to prioritise hot water or to charge battery. With my weather forecasting knowledge I have been right about 80% of the time as to whether to charge the battery overnight or not, and what to prioritise. It's not quite as automatic as it could be.
• February 2022 As a "sorry" the company gave us 1x extra panel free, for a total of 12. These are split into two strings, the old 8 and the new 4.

The system is working brilliantly. I believed, and was told, that our 3kW inverter would only ever generate 3kW of electricity. I had seen it clip when we only had 8 panels at about 3.3kW which seemed reasonable, but after putting them onto two strings of 8 and 4, the highest I've seen it go so far is just over 5kW - and given that that number is rising as the seasons go on I think it'll go higher. We haven't had a perfectly sunny day since November to test it properly, but it does seem to clip back to 3.3kW later in the day. 5kW of power gives 2.5kW to the battery and 2.5kW to the hot water, its brilliant.

Energia have sorted our deemed FIT at long last - sadly based on a 3kW deemed maximum, but oh well. We use every scrap of power at the moment - into the battery, hot water, and the second Eddi output is going to be used to power two "dumb" heaters in parallel in two different rooms.

I'm aware we're probably pushing the inverter a bit too hard, but if it goes bang, they offered us the extra panel so they can fix it, is my thinking.

Does anyone know how high the Sun2000 will ACTUALLY go? What will cause it to clip to 3.3kW, is it overheating, at which point it restricts things somehow, or is there more going on there? (And of course will this cause problems or shorten the life of anything?)

All going well in the land of our solar, however given that we're on a day/night meter (which I'm jealously guarding), the question has come up recently of what to do with any excess power.

System puts 5kW into our battery, thats fine.

Then it goes to Eddi.

Eddi Heater 1 is set to the immersion, thats fine.

Eddi Heater 2 is current going to a 700W storage heater in the bathroom. My dad is doing some of his trickery and is paralleling a second, dumb, oil fired heater onto this. He was an electrical engineer so although his work won't satisfy modern code, it's perfectly safe.

My question is this - what other devices can be used with Eddi? Its got to be dumb, but what appliances are actually dumb? So far, an immersion, our 1950s oil fired heater and storage heaters are the only things we've thought of. A small water heater next to the kitchen sink is being considered, but what else is there?

This has all been going extremely well lately and no updates all all, but things haven't gone so well this weekend.

One of my routers kicked off over the weekend, and I got the abnormal communication error on the FusionSolar app. A message was sent home and there was the obvious instruction to reset the router, which was duly done, but didn't make a difference as it turns out the inverter had connected to my wifi extender, which wasn't reset and had gotten stuck in a loop.

The engineer who was phoned told my dad to go up into the loft and reset the inverter and the batter which he did, but things haven't worked since. The engineer was supposed to visit today, but of course cancelled and now no solar until Monday.

Inverter (Huawei SUN2000-3KTL-L1) has two green lights on the front with the right hand wifi one flashing occasionally. It looks fine. But nothing is working, no voltage seen on either string and we're importing everything from the grid and the battery is not discharging. Everything is showing as connected and running but it looks like the inverter just isn't doing anything.

FusionSolar looks like the attached. Anything quick and easy I can try tomorrow or Sunday before the engineer comes?