The Solar Thread

How does that factor in ?

Well, being wildly optimistic*, you would fully charge the battery with free solar so you’d save £2.70/day which would reduce the break even point to 7.5 years

* This is assuming >10kWh of solar every day (not going to happen unless you have a BIG array), and you use > 10kWh of power from the battery every day (which is pretty unlikely for some months of the year)

DRJ, this is a good question

I don’t know is the answer.. I would have had a nose up the scaffolding but don’t like heights, i thought the only way was with brackets hooked under the tiles somehow.. part of the reason id like my mate to get up and have a quicky snoop, as i literally couldn’t 😀

if you want to see a decent example of  battery control, take a look at “predbat” and there should be some examples of the regime, mine is pretty simple being on flux, just charge as much as estimated to need overnight, although to fill with solar, discharge everything that isnt needed at peak, remain on battery until next charge period, excluding free periods (fill to max capacity in the window, or saving sessions, which dumps as much out). the more interesting agile plans can go up and down throughout the day

10kwh from solar doesn’t seem that wild.

We averaged 10.4 from a 4kw array  in 2023

I dipped into a couple of FB forums and others had build insulation boxes around them etc. Suppose it depends how cold they get in the depths of winter. Ours our in the garage.

Yes, ours is too. I just spoke to our installer and he said sometimes customers built boxes out of celotex but you need to leave room for airflow.

you’d save £2.70/day

Is it really £2.70 a day or are you assuming the solar is lost if not used. There may be an opportunity cost if that solar could be sold to the grid. We feed in at .15p per kW.

This is assuming >10kWh of solar every day (not going to happen unless you have a BIG array),

We have a relatively small 4.8KWp array, WSW facing so not optimal and even in this cloudy and dull year we’ll be averaging about 9KWh per day by the end of Dec.

As above I run predbat on Home Assistant which takes care of the battery charging and discharging, factoring in our typical usage and expected solar generation. If you’re not geeky enough to be into that sort of thing you can just hand control back to Octopus via Intelligent Flux and they’ll take care of it.