Random Renewables Thread

I purchased some items last year and found the Irish companies hard to deal with. Understaffed and too busy in most cases it seemed. Never call you back.

Purchased from Germany and Poland in the end. Cheaper and more professional. Cost about the same for delivery of a pallet of panels from Poland as a Dublin company was charging.

Ideally I would buy from an Irish company. But in my case I require a panel size none of them stock currently.

If I was doing a driving holiday to Europe I'd be tempted to grab a trailer and bring a pallet of panels home

Not really a money saver unless your were already going on holiday, but it would be easier than trying to organise a freight forwarding company

I had an eddi installed in the attic back in June when my solar PV was upgraded. I went with the attic because some people (can't remember who) were telling me of issues with installing it in the hot press due to heat. That sort of made sense to me.

Unfortunately the attic was a stupid place for it also as it turns out the insulation (cold roof construction) blocks a lot of the RF signal between the myenergi devices. That made it either not work or do things that it shouldn't do like Zappi charging from the battery or eddi sitting there doing nothing with 3kW going out the door. One device on the myenergi network misbehaving can and will screw up everything else.

Tried an extension aerial as suggested by myenergi support and while that helped it wasn't quite enough to overcome the insulation issue. The aerial is in the buy/sell thread if anyone is interested.

Finally got a local sparks out on Thursday and he moved it down into the hot press. Ideal location for it and zero issues now. I had been monitoring the temp in there for the past few months with one of my zigbee thermometers and it never got above about 27C. Generally sits around 21 or so. Happy with that.

Positive is that I should be able to add the extra board to the eddi and temp sensor much much easier now.

@silver_sky - that was really silly from the installer to install in the attic. For me the most important feature of the eddi after of course the fact that it diverts my excess PV to hot water instead of the grid where I don't get paid for it, is that my wife and kids can just simply press the boost button whenever the water is not hot enough. Without having to bother me or me or my wife having to go into the Nest app and get the gas boiler to do it.

This happens on a daily basis. We could hardly ask them to climb into the attic every time 😂

@Mr Q did you checkout GWL for panels?

They're probably not the cheapest but they do have 500W panels and they ship to Ireland

I don't think I could handle my wife having remote access to the heating controls. She's bad enough turning the thermostat up to around 22C at night and trying to boil me to death 😬

my silliness 🙂 i guarantee if i show the boost button it will be used daily even if not necessary 😂

"Nope. My wife has the Nest app on her phone, so if that is easier for them to use, they will use that, burning gas instead of using electricity. We need to go electric and stop burning stuff!"

Would you not have the MyEnergi App on your phone and boost remotely using that?

I physically cut off the phone line coming into the house in 2005. That was painful back then as VOIP was still in its infancy, even more so in Ireland. I remember that at some point we got Blueface. Far from perfect but a revelation compared to what went before them.

Looks like these guys are a goer.

They only ship pallets though, and shipping is something like €1k to Ireland

If you really want the big panels and can fit 30 of them on your roof, or can sell the spares on, then it might work out

They've got a lot of handy guides on their website for building batteries and stuff, although some of the products they have seem a bit low tech compared to the likes of Seplos and others

I must check how much it is to ship to Cherbourg, for a laugh I worked out you could get the ferry to France with a trailer and come back the same day for around €500. If you got free shipping to Europe then it would save some money

Yes those pouches are crap. Still no fire though. And to add to that, I put a bunch of badly swollen Pylon pouches to the test last year (at twice the rated current) and there was a lot more swelling and then one burst and vented like bejaysus. No fire though. LiFePO4 is safe.

Jaysus, that's bad.