A great start to June
They must be monitoring this site, the price went up €12 + Vat overnight 👎🏻
That's with trade discount
Third day in a row in the 60's
Largely cloudy but a few rays of sunshine after 3pm really saved the day.
5 days in
Ok so install took place Thursday, no issues other than a bit of wind and rain while the guys were on the roof, I’m pleased with the install and the guys were great very neat and tidy and left no trace that they had been here.
Output has been 38Kw, 33Kw, 29Kw, 28Kw and around 29Kw today.
I’m still finding my way round the Solis APP and cloud and hope to start integrating into Home Assistant in the next while.
🌞 6.96kWp PV System. West Dublin🌞
Looking good, very similar to my numbers. 42 39 26.8 17 33.1 kWh today.
Yeah, what really suprises me (suppose never really gave it much thought) but is how much difference the fluffy white things in the sky make and how quickly output can go from many Kw to a few hundred watts in a split second.
Slightly off topic, but just looking at my most upto date HDF file from ESBN and daily average usage has dropped to 1.74Kw which is mostly the charging of the batteries during the TOU window.
Question, should I switch the TOU off for the summer and only start using once daylight hours start reducing, or am I looking at it the wrong way and best practice is to keep batteries at or near 100% SOC?
Thanks
TOU = ?
Little bit off the Daily PV production theme, but the answer to your question depends on a number of factors. If your night rate is significantly cheaper than your FIT rate, you want to be charging your batteries from <whatever % they are at → 100% every night). The logic is that your FIT rate will generate a higher rate if you export it than filling your battery.
E.g. some people on here have a €0.07 (or something night time rate), so they fill their batteries to 100% and then export everything they generate during the day getting €0.24 for that
If your night rate is close to your FIT rate, accounting for losses of 10%-20%…..it's a different strategy, so you need to figure out your numbers.
Sorry, yeah what I meant was should I switch off the charging of the batteries during the EV window (2-6 @0.07 cent) and just let the batteries charge from the panels during day, or should I charge them up to 100% then come 11pm if they are charged past 20% ie say 80% which they have been since the system went live, should I then discharge them back to grid or will this reduce the life span of the batteries (charge cycles) so any gain in FIT is lost because of the cost of replacing batteries?
In a similar boat here with new install, but I won’t be considering battery replacement cost as a factor - they’ll be cheap as chips by the time they need replacement.
That said, I’ve turned overnight charging down to a trickle for the summer months. Solar starts generating just after 4:30am, only need 30-40% in battery once the house gets going around 7/7:30, and have the battery filling up all morning then after we’ve started work/left for school. Mind you, still waiting for FiT to be set up by esbn so trying to maximise consumption just now.
It's a good question, but the idea is sort of flawed. Battery is there to be used. it's akin to buying a new car and then not wanting to use it as you'll increase the mileage and reduce the resale value.
Batteries have typically a cycle range of 6000 cycles. Going 1 cycle a day, that's ~16 years until it get to it "expected life". I should also note that expected life doesn't mean that the battery is dead. No, usually it means that at 6000 cycles it'll store about 70%-80% of it's original capacity and will slowly continue to deteriorate further.
I've just broken 1050 cycles myself on my own battery and haven't noticed any drop off in performance.
Battery is there to be used (so that it can pay back itself), so use it…..and use it hard! :-)
Ha ha yeap indeed same here, BER guy was only out yesterday, and switch to Energia is still not confirmed and yes agree with you about the cost of storage going forward.
I suppose what I'd really like to know is if there is any point charging and discharging batteries to make extra money from FIT?
Ah I see its all beginning to make sense, so what I really need to do is to set a discharge time of say 10pm to 2am. Would that be sufficient time to discharge from the average left in batteries so far of 80% (10.6K batt) or would I need to up the discharge current currently set at 50A, so get me to the 20% SOC?
should be okay, 50 amps at 50V (DC) should offload at about 2.5kW so four hours would drain your 10kWh battery if allowed (presets won’t allow it in reality).
That said, if you’re confident in those numbers (at least during summer), it might be better for our grid to let a few kWh go during peak demand 5-7pm instead. Solar will probably add more back into the battery before dusk anyway. In due course, I expect we’ll be paid handsomely for this a la Octopus in the UK.
Another 33Kw today, lot of cloud around, more questions for the experts, if the inverter is rated at 5Kw and the load and batteries are satisfied, what happens to any output above 5Kw?
Also why is it the load appears to flat line at certain times of the day (mainly when load is small), I've asked the installers to check it out, could it be something to do with the sensitivity of the CT, or even its position?
What happens to the power above 5kW, its simply not generated. its not like wind or hydro where there is dump loads etc.
24.9kWh today. Great to see solid generation on what was/is a largely cloudy day.
June has been heads and shoulders above May so far with 223kWh generated in the 7 days to date.
It's funny isn't it, I'm only up the road from you and I'm about on par with May so far. June started off well but has really tailed off the last few days in East Cork. Tomorrow looks better though.
On 200kw for first 7 days of May on 6.5kw system. Definitely decision to put 6 panels East rather than West been off so far. Feels like its generally gotten lot sunnier in evenings than morning.
Happy days :)
Tomorrow could be epic for Dublin area anyway - if Met Eireann's solar forecast is accurate. Seeing in about my all time high level. Long day middle of June, lots of sun
Here's hoping…… Last time they forecasted into the 40's kWh for me it fell well short of the mark (above)
Pretty sure that app is wrong or else wrong location. Dont think we are getting 27 degrees all day tmoro anywhere in Ireland
Yeah, something well off there with Windows. Although it says "Dublin", if you go to www.met.ie forecast for tomorrow is supposed to be 14-15c https://www.met.ie/forecasts/Dublin no way is it 27C. No chance.
Sunny though - so that's the main thing. The lower temps actually work in our panel efficency favour too, so yeah…..
Ive had a body warmer (or gillet if you want to be fancy 😂) all week.
House even has been calling for heat too. That north wind is cold for June.
Bonus, far less chance for flystrike in sheep!
Tomorrow looking decent-ish up here, but weather to take a turn for the worse for the end of the week
They just can't seem to get the full sunshine days right lately for Dublin :-)
20-30 Km away full sunshine all day so far - LOL. Me? Struggling to break 1.2Kw
Lowest yield so far today since install not even 14KwH.
Gotta love an E setup at this time of the year. My cheap night rate ends at 6am. And at that very moment, E decides to wakesup and is generating 100w. And I’ve a W (we’ll NW really) that still generates 100w until 9pm.
Yeah, yeah I’ll never get the monster stats of ye S heads :) But I can live without that. We’ve no battery so the E/W is handy for that longer spread over the day.
PV newbie here. Just had a 3.05kWp E facing, 4.35kWp W facing system installed, North Dublin. On some days, the output is very 'spikey', even though the overall yield is ok. See below as an example. Note I've no smart meter yet, so no export?
Is this spikiness expected? Obviously the irradiance changes for lots of reasons, but I can't measure this independently.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://wd.vanillicon.com/v2/da062963b749703a88f3d03ba7706479.svg)
