August is meant to be full of gloriously hot days. An endless parade of sunshine and drinks in the park. This year it seemed mostly grey, miserable, and prone to pissing it down at a moment's notice. We all know that solar panels' efficiency wilts in the heat, but do they get a tan work [...]
A blog post about my London-based solar panels and battery.
Some interesting data, although given the high initial cost of installation I feel those "we paid only 1£" are a bit misplaced.
Anyways, I finally scraped together some money and also got a 5kw LiFePO4 battery system yesterday. Still need to install everything DIY, but I will probably hook up some statistics monitoring system as well as the new hybrid inverter has a cool integration with the Home Assistant software.
I've been thinking of getting a hybrid inverter (rather than manually moving loads between grid power and inverter/solar power). How much did it set you back?
I'm curious what type of Statistics monitoring system you aiming for @poVoq. I have ordered a 3.7kw panels + special type inverter for direct heating of a boiler and a secondary boiler/other item. And i am intrigued what the monthly differences are in kWh generation and would like to track those. Only I have no idea what I can hook up between the panels and inverter to log.
I doubt it's the cost of electricity itself, but rather that the average European uses a lot less electricity (mainly due to more energy efficient appliances and no AC use).
"Our solar power feeds into our local grid for our neighbours to use. We sell the electricity at market rates - which change every 30 minutes. This made us £13."
Some more details on this would be interesting. We're currently with Octopus and get just 15p/kWh when we sell back to the grid, but have to pay 25p/kWh when we buy from the grid.
What kind of rates (average?) are you getting, and who's your supplier?