Anyone doing it?
Interested in experiences/costs/recommendations.
Cheers
Tim

Google “Maslow”

I’d suggest looking on Navitron – lots of good info there.

igm – cut to the chase. Need/want/wtf?
sb – thanks. Will take a gander.

Tesla have just announced their solution, and there’s one other in the UK, but their name escapes me.

I don’t think he meant that ‘maslow’.
Prob this one:
http://www.meetmaslow.com/

Have you looked at grid-tying instead, or just using car batteries?

For the moment, I’m going to just hook mine up to the mains and assume that I’ll be using at least some energy during all daylight hours.

That Maslows a bit different from the GCSE level psychology I waded into on google!! I’ll take a detailed look at that as well.

We re-learnt to use our leccy during the day but still export at times so I was hoping to find a solution for a bit of evening storage.

First quote was astronomical and un-economical. Installed cost was £3800 and savings over 10 years was £2000. You do the maths :O/

Off to Google Tesla and grid tying…………..

Tesla recently announced such a system, will be a way off being available in the UK though.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tesla-s-powerwall-to-be-available-in-canada-by-2016-1.3061614

Didn’t Tesla do a rather fancy battery powered car??????????
Their system is a bit chunky for our home system.

Tesla is talking about using the same battery tech from its cars for home pods. Makes sense. A client is working on a project for datacentres which re-uses old Nissan electric vehicle batteries in stacks. If Tesla can make the home pods sing, it’ll be excellent news.

Tesla still do their fancy car(s)

They have an £80k beast that looks a bit like a very slick Jag XF or even a Mondeo, full of laptop batteries and available in the UK, they have a showroom in Crawley and another up North.

One negative is that it isn’t really that distinctive, and I only noticed one glide past me on the motorway and notice that it wasn’t a Jag because I’d been doing some work in one of their showrooms.

To be honest you could look into getting a leccy car such as a Leaf, and using the surplus energy to top it up rather than trying to reuse it in the house.

All this reconstituted dc on the AC grid is not going to end well.

A leccy car would be ace. Initial outlay is a bit frightening though.

The problem with charging batteries is that they’re so expensive and the numbers just don’t really add up at the moment.

If you’re looking to be more efficient, the most cost effective way to use your excess pv generation is to fit a proportional immersion controller that send spare power to heat your water rather than out to the grid.

I’ve got one at another house that is completely electrically heated. From about mid-april to mid-september it does all our hot water (210L direct Megaflo) by about 9am.
Once the water’s hot it can then send power to a second (or even third) form of heater.
There are a number around, Immersun being the best known at the moment.

Apologies timbur, alexsimon is correct. They were presenting after me at DECC the other day and it looked very interesting. Tesla too but U.S. Only at the moment I think.

Cheekyboy – potentially in the view of my boss and myself it’s and excellent idea – if done properly. However it will make the last 5 to 10 years of smart grid research virtually irrelevant.

cheekyboy and igm – does double conversion do any good, or am I barking up the wrong tree and showing my ignorance?

Cheekyboy – potentially in the view of my boss and myself it’s and excellent idea – if done properly. However it will make the last 5 to 10 years of smart grid research virtually irrelevant.

I am talking about the increasing amount of switched mode power supplies both supplying the grid and being supplied by the grid

PV= DC, to feed the grid requires conversion to AC but its not really AC is it ! Real AC comes from a rotating machine (this is why really critical power supplies use rotary UPS). I worked for a large telecoms company we had an independent survey done on the effects of the large amounts of switch mode equipment we had in switch site/data centres and the results were quite scary with regard to what we were feeding back into the system.

Many of the power networks engineers I speak to in the course of my current job have concerns about the increase in PV.

I am a power networks engineer and a reasonably senior one at that.

DC to AC conversion has come on a lot over the last few years and some of the issues aren’t what they used to be. Harmonics in particular are far better controlled. Remember most modern wind farms are Fully converted connected so they are no different to PV in that respect.

Stable frequency is still an issue, but I have my suspicions that will start to disappear as a concern at some point to as systems get (slowly) adapted to cope with non stable frequencies.

spooky_b329 – Member

Tesla still do their fancy car(s)

They have an £80k beast that looks a bit like a very slick Jag XF or even a Mondeo, full of laptop batteries and available in the UK, they have a showroom in Crawley and another up North.

One negative is that it isn’t really that distinctive, and I only noticed one glide past me on the motorway and notice that it wasn’t a Jag because I’d been doing some work in one of their showrooms.

I got a Tesla taxi to Nice airport from Monaco at the end of last year.
What an amazing car!

If Tesla can make the home pods sing, it’ll be excellent news.

There’s no doubt that , in theory, it’s a good idea – but the units need to be a fraction of the price they are now to be viable.
Even @ £1000 for a 10Kwh unit the payback time is going to be about 4-5 years and this assumes nothing going wrong with it and that the price includes installation and the required inverters (Tesla battery is about £2800 atm exc inverters,etc.)

And a 10kWh, 10-15kW unit is probably the right size.