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If your immersion is 3kw and panels are producing 1kw and sending back to the grid would the diverter turn it on and so draw 2kw from the grid to run it or only do so when it gets to 3kw production or just supply 1kw to the immersion and heat the water more slowly.
Should just supply 1 KW, it just supplies a lower voltage to the immersion, to drive it at 1 KW.
Yeah, it just drives the immersion at whatever you're exporting (at least ours does)
No, you misunderstand how the diverter works.
It doesn't 'switch anything on' so please forget about that for starters!
It simply sits between the consumer unit and the immersion and when it detects surplus generation it sends just that amount (less a bit) to your immersion. The amount of power sent to the immersion varies constantly depending upon the surplus generation.
This is why heaters are great with PV - you can feed them almost any level of voltage and it will get turned into heat. An electric motor, on the other hand, needs full voltage constantly
As I said the other day on the solar thread, I also have an IFTTT system that switches on the electric underfloor when there's plenty of production - the risk with this though is that a big cloud comes over and production drops but the floor is still taking 800w so it starts importing power from the grid until it's told to switch off.
This is why i have a pretty high generation threshold before the floor is told to switch on.
The amount of power sent to the immersion varies constantly depending upon the surplus generation.
Probably has a minimum threshold below which it wont bother. My iBoost is 100W.
(less a bit)
Why less a bit?
Why less a bit?
Losses in the power modulation circuitry - it's doing a fair bit dropping the voltage to continually modulate the power to the immersion element. I suspect they get quite warm....