My Solar install Journey September 2022

Hi folks,

Took a while to get back to this. I have my system live now since the 11th of November. Overall very happy with my setup. As previously mentioned the panels were installed in October and I had to wait a few weeks for the electrical work to be completed. When I placed my order I requested a Gen2 Givenergy inverter and ordered an 8.2kwh battery (this is all they had in stock) On the day they arrived they had a 9.5kwh battery which was a win for me but only a gen 1 inverter. The main spec difference between gen 1 and 2 is that the gen 2 can do 3.6kw charging to and from the battery versus 2.6kw on the gen 1. It can give you 30% more battery power to cover house load. Conversely you can get 30% more into the battery when charging which is important if you are on a short cheap night tariff.

I talked to my install company and they told me the gen 2's had an issue and stock would not be available until March 23. They were happy for me to hold some payment back with the agreement that they would swap out the gen 1 for a gen 2 when they became available. I was happy that they were so reasonable about it.

I had also asked about a backup eps socket to be installed but they refused to do that. A bit miffed about it but they knocked another bit off the final price for me instead. I reckon they just couldnt be bothered with the hassle of it but I'll come back to that later!

Re the location for the inverter - we sort of lucked out on having an old oiler boiler room built into the side of our house. The oil boiler was gone before we moved in and replaced with a gas boiler which is in a different location. This little room is small but meant we had a place to hide away all the gear and avoid having it exposed to the outdoors or having it in the attic. The other bonus is that this room had an old flu running right to the roof so the installers were able to run the panel cables down to the inverter/battery and its all very tidy.

Before install

After install

I was a little worried about the ventilation for the equipment so I added a couple of vents to the top and bottom of the external door. I bought a govee temp sensor from amazon and monitor the temps of the room. https://amzn.eu/d/1kqYNxZ

After adding the vents top and bottom to the door the average temp dropped by 10 degrees c.

That all went live November 11th. Installer has an engineer portal for givenergy they log on to and kick off commissioning of the system and calibration of the batteries. That all took 4 or 5 hours and the system was up and running. I'll do a separate post showing the givenergy portal, app, talk a bit about my electricity tarrif, additions since and how things have been going in general - the ber and grant processing.

Back roof panels (south east) 4 kwp

Front roof panels 3 kwp

North West (These sleep most of the winter as the sun doesn't hit them directly in the afternoons/evenings)

They installed the Eddi in the hotpress beside the cylinder

Cheers,

Mick

The portal has a ton of data in there. For example you can see generation data for the day. Broken down by strings. This is from yesterday. My string 2 is my north west facing panels. As I mentioned these were largely asleep for the winter months but on a good evening now they are starting to produce more. This should only get better for the next coupe of months hopefully! March felt like a wet month.

Here's my solar generation stats from install to early March (March in general has been a poor month!) Its up to the 7th of March when my Invertor was swapped over (top diagram) and post swap is below picture

Since 7th March to 3rd April

So you scan see its an improving picture from December. I only went live November 11th so missing 10 days generation there.

As mentioned in the above post we noticed in December getting all day out of the 9.5kwh battery to 11pm was sometimes a stretch. Had a bit of extra cash lying around in February and while I'm sure it probably won't pay for itself I looked at adding another battery to the system. You can daisy chain the givenergy batteries together. I checked with my installer and they quoted me 4.5k plus vat for another 9.5 kwh battery. Way more than I wanted to spend. I checked around and was able to source a 5.2kwh givenergy battery for 2k including VAT. Its important to note the 5.2kwh battery only has a depth of discharge or usable capacity of 80%. That gives it a usuable capacity of 4.1 kwh. Added to my existing setup that gives me a total capacity of 13.6kwh. My installer contacted me in March re the gen 2 inverter swap over and I asked if they would also install the battery which they did for free. So since about the 8th March I'm on the gen 2 inverter and second battery. I could see from early February the 9.5 would easily have covered my day use with the solar being generated but its nice to know the extra cover will be there come the dark months of winter. I was able to make a stand for the battery and place it in front of the existing and its strapped in place. I think I'm done adding things to this room!

Thats pretty much it for now. The only one remaining item is the EPS (emergency power supply during powercuts). I talked to my installer when they were back doing the inverter swapover and they said the eps terminals are active so I can have my own electrician wire a socket to it - Put in a 10amp breaker and make sure the socket is earthed to the earth rod. The electrician I normally get to do work is off for a few weeks vacation but he said he'd do it when he's back. Im planning to have the socket run close to where my broadband router and modem are and run them off it as a sort of UPS. Givenergy says this is possible as there's no break in socket power when you get a power failure (even if there wasn wouldnt be a big deal). I'll also be able to run a few lights and anything under 2.6kw from the socket (probably the tv). We dont get a lot of power cuts but last winter we had 5. It was very frustrating to have a half full battery sitting there that we couldn't do anything with. There are fancier options where you can have manual or auto failover of the whole house supply during a power cut but we definitely don't need that. It's worth doing for a couple of hundred euro to have the socket and convenience of a backup if/when the power does go again!

I'll update the thread again when I have that wired.

I know I've dumped a lot of information which some might find useful some think pointless but I wanted to document the process and how its gone for us so far. What I might do over the next few days is 'What would we have done differently?' type of post. We are only 5 months into living with the system with the next 5 months probably the best Solar producing months so hoping for only better performance over the next few months. Already I can see us getting to the 2am night boost rate window with sometimes 40/50 percent battery capacity left so we will import less and less during the summer months would be my guess. I don't do any solar forecasting around charging the battery as im better off charging it fully on the cheapest rate and exporting as much excess solar as possible

Cheers,

Mick

A few more bits since my last post:

Electrician ran an a new socket circuit from the inverter EPS. Originally I was going to put a socket in the room next to the inverter but I wanted to be able to run our broadband/wifi in a power cut. This was all located in the back corner of the house, so the electrician ran piping around the house to the back corner and installed a new socket inside. He had to put a 10amp rcbo on the circuit as per Givenergy EPS installation. The circuit also needed its own earth path to the existing earth rod. It has a max load of 2400 watts, but we running nothing like that off it. We did buy a 900 watt kettle just to be able to boil a kettle in the case of power cuts - and I added a Govee floor light as well which runs off the socket to avoid the usual scramble for candles/torches if we lose power.

It all works a treat. We had it installed in May and had our first power cut a week or so later. Unfortunately our broadband didn't work during the powercut. It seems Virgin media depends on power being on in the area. I was having having a look around and noticed Starlink were doing an offer on hardware and decided to bite the bullet and order it. It was never going to be as fast as Virgin but in theory always works in a power cut. Had that installed in May and trialled it along side our VM BB and the house felt no different. No complaints on gaming, streaming or working from home. So we cancelled Virgin and sticking with Starlink for now. Siro is coming to our estate so I might suss that out in time to see how it works in power outages etc. Might seem a little extreme to switch broadband providers just to be able to have internet in a power outage. We probably don't have enough power cuts to justify it. When we do though we don't have data on phones either so just frustrating. We had a power cut shortly after the Starkink install and it was cool still to have all up and running.

We had a couple of hiccups in May/June with the Solar inverter RCBO tripping in the consumer board. Reported it to our installer and after a few weeks they sent out an electrician and they replaced the 25 amp rcbo with a 32 amp one (as GiveEnergy recommend) No tripping since that.

The other thing I wanted to do was level up the number of panels we have on the back roof of the house - We had 11, a row of 5 and row of 6. I was told at install they were 370 watt panels. I enquired with the installer and they said they were actually 350 watt panels and they were no longer available. We chatted over and back about the fact i was told 370 watt panels were going up on the day and they agreed if they could source an extra panel they would fit it for free. That's gone up this week, so I now have 12 panels on the back of the house and 8 on the front. Not really much more I can do panel wise.

Couple of other changes we made, I sold our condenser tumble dryer and bought a heatpump dryer. Bought secondhand off adverts and sold our own there as well. Cost hardly anything to change. Notice a big difference in power usage. Typically with the condenser dryer we would see 2.6kwh used for at least 1.5 hours. With the heatpump dryer I've seen full loads dried for 750 watts. It never seems to use over 500 watts at any one time, which helps keep the house load below the 3.6kwh the inverter can supply to the house load.

We also swapped out the kettle which was 3200 watts for a 2200 watt one. It takes longer to boil, but just helps keep the house load down when lots on and avoids grid import.

The one other change we made was to extend the EPS circuit to also run the TV from it. The whole circuit averages less that 200 watts. The covers the starlink router, netgear mesh router, rasperry pi, tv and satelite box. Electrician put a spur on the tv circuit and fused it down so it can only do 1200 watts max. Again this is a complete convenience play. Its really nice to have the TV and broadband/wifi up and running during power cuts.