Solar for Beginners [ask your questions here]

Newbie question( probably been asked loads of times but here goes anyway)

I have a 5.56kw system with a Solis inverter and 10kw battery.

I have changed over to Energia in the last few days to avail of the cheap night rate.

What I intend to do is "dump" my surplus SOC between 12 midnight and 1 50am. Then charge my battery at the cheap rate from 2am to 6am( I know that it wont take the full 4 hours to do it)

Also, I will be charging my PHEV at the cheap rate on a granny charger( wont charge completely, but hopefully over a couple of nights I will get up to full charge in the car)

I have asked the installer to set up the battery to force discharge and then recharge as above and he is to revert to me tomorrow.

However, I charged the car last night and it basically emptied my battery. I would expect this as I want the battery to cater for as much of my demand as possible.

When the installer changes the battery/inverter settings will the car and battery charge together from the grid so that I have a charged car and a fully charged battery at 6am every morning, or will the battery, as it charges then start to charge the car.

If you have the funds, I would fill the roof with panel as your first step. I would replace your existing panels and just go for a full new install, trying to keep them included will be more hassle than their worth as your new panels will be different wattage and sizes.

Installing panels should make the inverter and battery upgrade vat free, so almost certainly be worth it.

Even if you don't have the funds, I would consider borrowing to pay for this. Your electricity bill must be €4/5k a year? I'd imagine even without the grant you'd get a full roof with 20kWh of batteries for less than €15k off some crowds. If you got your bill down by €3k a year, it would have a pay off of 5 years.

I would go to kilowatt.ie and put in your smart meter data. And then configure some hypothetical solar and battery systems to see the impact on your bill. (If you fill the roof it would be a 10kW solar system, but since some is North facing it might be a bit lower than that in reality). The yearly bill that this comes back with should give you a good idea of how long it would take to pay back. Just one thing to note that your existing system will throw off the hypothetical a bit. It might make more sense to configure it as the net new solar , like a 8kW system, as your smart meter data already has the ~2kW system accounted for.

If your electrician does solar, I'm assuming he'd do a competent job from a safety and standards point of view, you could just spec what you want from suggestions here and see would he be interested. I don't have a clue so maybe wait for someone with more experience to suggest, but It probably makes sense to go with a solis s6 as the inverter as Solis stuff is relatively well regarded and it's compatible with cheaper batteries. You could probably save a lot on the batteries by going for the cheaper ones that get mentioned on here too.

One issue with tonnes of battery storage is starts to become a challenge to charge them during the cheap window. You can only charge roughly 5kWh of battery every hour with a standard setup. Some lads here use external chargers to help increase that. But depending on what your ESB supply is limited to, you might not really have capacity to do that. Some houses only have a 12kW supply (63 amp fuse), your car charger and standsrd wat for charging the house battery alone would max this out, so there wouldn't be room for anything else

The export is low, but your day rate usage is very high so presumably you self consumed a lot.

It says the Shelly Pro 3EM can also do single-phase. I guess what I'm wondering is does that cover all 63 amps? Is there any way to know without getting an electrician to look at the fuseboard?

The Shelly Pro 3EM 120A seems like it would work, but costs a good bit more.

Should have mentioned that part of the reason I want an energy meter is for future compatibility with a solar battery. The Pro 3EM works with EcoFlow and Anker Solix, but I don't think the EM gen 3 is compatible, unfortunately.

My other option is just to pick a battery brand now and use their energy meter -

Sounds like I'll have to get an electrician to look either way.

My parents and brother have separately installed Sungrow SH5.0RS inverters as part of their solar setups. It was a DIY job with the help of a electrician. The systems are up and running and working well, especially my brother's who has 12kWp of panels feeding into the 5kW inverter (they can be impressively oversized).

The plan is to possibly add batteries in a year or so however during my research for them I noticed that the inverter is designed for HV batteries which are astronomical in price.

From what I can see their only options are to a) pony up and add HV batteries from the likes of Sungrow or b) install an AC coupled battery.

The second option looks to be far cheaper even if from a technical and efficiency standpoint not ideal.

Are there any other options?

Thanks.

Option C would mean the brother having to reduce the number of panels he has from 24 to 20 (10kWp) if he was to put in a Solis Hybrid inverter for example. Be a bit of shame to do that.

It can communicate with the battery in real time, so the battery knows exactly how much to output. I don't have solar at the moment, this is really for if/when plug-in solar ever becomes legal in Ireland.