Solar PV battery options

Nice setup, is the shed shaded in winter? Back of my house is N facing and shades the shed in winter 😥

I am also thinking about N panels when they make sense financially, can get 11 on the house and 3 on the kitchen extension

Would probably devolve into "that's not up to spec/ok with the regs" unfortunately.

Yeah, don't do it. It's bogus. You will not get your batteries if you order there. You will eventually get your money back. Guess how I know. Been there many times with AliExpress.

A while is a bit of an understatement 😂

I think the official delivery window is 75 days. After that there is a 15 day dispute process. And if you win that, there is a 15 day process for refunds (although I have found the last one to usually only take a few working days)

Hey Folks,

Just ordered an install of 6kw of Panels, 6kw inverter and 5kw Pure Drive Battery.

I have a Heat Pump in the house and am ready to pick up an EV so electricity usage will be high this winter.

Wondering should i increase the battery to 10kw and use more from the night rate or maybe add a few more 370watt panels ?

Im hearing contradicting reports,, Some say get the panels as big as possible first and others talking about the Battery size.. good craic

Yeah, I'd weigh in behind unkel.

Basically, panels are the engine of the whole thing. Nobody has ever come onto the forums and said

"I bought too many panels".

Many however, have said "I wish I bought more" (including myself). You can't fill those large batteries unless you have enough generation capacity. You might say, "Ohh but I'll fill them from night rate and use during the day", and while that in general is a good strategy, the real value in a battery is being able to store the "free" leccie that you get from the panels as opposed to the 1/2 price night rate.

For sure, there are always edge cases, but really if you are going 2x (or more) your panel size in battery storage, you'd want to have done the math. it's not "wrong" per say, just that it wouldn't be an average household consumption.

Absolutely hick. Absolutely.

Again, what I was saying was in relation to an average household. That in Ireland is someone who consumes about 4000-4500 units a year. Previously to your mail you hadn't really specified how much exactly you were using so my advice was more towards that average household. It's highly likely that you consume way more than that. I'm in about 11,000-12,000 myself so I know I'm not average.

Your EV usage should be discounted as you wouldn't charge the house batteries to then charge the car batteries. I mean "technically" you could, but it'd be dumb as you lose 10-15% charging one to lose 10-15% charging the other. So you'd just charge the EV directly from the grid at night time anyway.

I would however encourage you to do the math yourself. It might not be as advantageous as you think. When I was doing this myself, I even went as far as writing a little application for it. Plugging in (say) €7000 for a 15Kwhr battery with my own SSE rates.

14 years for battery payback - and that's if you fully charge and deplete your battery every single day, no holidays to Butlins :-) Heat pump ON in the middle of summer etc.

I don't want you to read this that you shouldn't or it's a dumb idea in getting a large battery. I'm actually quite pro-battery in fact. No, my warnings here are just so that you walk in with your eyes wide open. Lots of good reasons to get a large battery. Financial is only one of them, but as you can see, it's not as easy as you think.

(If you could go DIY on the battery, I wouldn't even bother with the financials and "just do it")

Basing a decision to buy hardware that will last 40 years on your use case of today is short sighted. As we move away from fossil fuels, we will all use a lot more electricity going forward. The install of a few extra panels costs peanuts if you are having PV installed (either by an installer or DIY). No matter what your use case, it makes sense to maximise the number of panels on your roof for the overwhelming majority of households. Remember a significantly big install can also handle a lot of your hot water needs and there will be a feed in tariff at some stage that will easily pay off for the extra panels on its own, over the lifespan of the panels. Perhaps it will get so warm that we will need air conditioning in houses in summer. PV is a perfect fit for that

It is also unavoidable that gas / oil will become increasingly expensive as we have to phase fossil fuels out over the next few decades. Even now heating your water with immersion at night rate is already pretty much on a par cost wise with using gas / oil in an efficient boiler. And doing it with clean wind energy at night (or indeed from your solar PV panels during the day) is far more environmentally friendly

Think forward, folks!

Yes I do this, we installed an extra run of cables back from the outbuilding to the house for the EPS supply. What's the distance? You're probably fine.

I would definitely go bigger, at least 6mm2, maybe even 10mm2, you never know down the line.

Yes mine is exactly 30m from inverter to consumer unit in house. No problems whatsoever but went with 6mm SWA. If I was doing it again I would go 10/12mm cable as expanded and am getting close to it's limits soon

Me after 20kwh delivery today

And no it didn't come like this, that's a photo of the aftermath 😂

need an unboxing video .. :)

How much were they and any link to where you ordered them from? Reason you didn't go CALBS is you not comfortable to do the DIY build (with BMS)?