Solar for Beginners [ask your questions here]

My installer warned me against not having one. Solartricity too. As others say, part of the grant requirements. However, now that I'm on my third one (they only have so many switchings in them before they fail,) when it too fails then I shall connect the males and females and not bother with a new one. I'll put a sign up somewhere warning that there isn't one. If there's a mechanical one that is not reliant on electricity then I might install that instead. I think there are mechanical ones for neon signs.

yeah we got a regina doherty newsletter in the door a few weeks ago where the esb say its due to the number of houses being built in the area.. they have a few things in the pipeline to improve the situation but i wouldn't hold my breath. One of the times it went after the water being off for 1.5 days.. i reckon everyone just boiled the kettle and had showers at the same time and lashed on ovens so probably overloaded the grid.

A stupid questions post:

Background: Electricity bill is currently fine, but gas bill has been through the roof last few bills, so really need to do something about it. We use gas for heating the immersion/hot water, and for cooking, and I want to retain the gas hob. Four adults in the house, using power during daytime, pretty much all year round, between study and WFH.

Our house faces east-west and isn't overlooked/shaded. I can potentially put panels on both the front and back roofs. We don't have an EV, but our next car (changing in 2 to 4 years) will be either PHEV or full EV.

• Can we use solar PV to both provide power for the house and to heat the water tank?
• Can we both heat the water tank and also charge a battery? (Car will be light use, mostly, but would be charged overnight)
• If we had panels on both roofs to provide usual power, charge a battery and heat the water, would there still be excess power we could sell back to the grid? Or am I looking for too much there? Basically I'm trying to work out what's the most bang for our buck, if a two-roof system can't do it all.
• Any recommendations for installers who would work Dublin northside and would provide a quote without "needing" excessive details (some of the websites I have seen seem designed just to get contact details so you can be added to a spam list!)

As for inspecting your property after the grant has been given, I'd be pretty confident that SEAI have no legal standing and you could tell them to f%$* off and that "would be the end of that".

Removal of the fireman's switch is one of those things which is probably debatable. Ultimately it's your house and your call. I should say here that I'm not a spark, but my understanding of it is that it does serve a useful function in certain scenarios. If you have a long wiring path from the entry of the strings through the roof into house and then down through your house to finally the inverter, it could serve as a safety measure in the event of a fire. Normally what they do is kill the mains, so then that switch would isolate that 400-500vdc being live should a fireman be swinging an axe. If on the otherhand the inverter is in the attic and meters away from the entry point - it's a bit pointless if you ask me. So removing it could (potentially) be an issue - but on the other hand having working solar in a outage is nice :-)

I guess they insist as they simply don't want to get into a debate over the distances, so they mandate it for all.

Nahh, I'm in your camp mate. I'm just saying what the disadvantage is if you are going to disable it. Personally I think it's totally fine. There's an argument though to avoid disabling it depending on where your inverter is located and the path the wiring is taking. For example, let's say your inverter is in your utility room near the back door. That's a long way from the roof that those cables are running.

Dunno - if there was a way to have the fireman switch and then be able to by pass it in a power cut by a manual swap over, that probably would be the best of both worlds.

Me? I'm in south city Dublin. Can't remember a outage of more than 1 hr in the last year. The EPS socket is fine I think (for me)

I installed Home Assistant to stop me looking at the inverter panel. It did the trick. Now, I look at the Home Assistant panel all day.

Question for the audience: I'm going with two Hoymiles microinverters for a small solar project (three panels total). I can get a DTU-WLite (2.4G) for 58 EUR, but it appears to be limited to four panels and the other DTU offerings are seemingly crazy money. How are people finding the monitoring/management of the microinverters and how well does their cloud integrate into Home Assistant?

I'm sure this has been asked before but is it necessary to get a BER cert done when getting the SEAI grant?

In the process of getting quotes - is there any significant difference between different solar panel brands, specifically is there any benefit from going for supposed premium panels?

E.g. Recom RCM-390-6BHE 390Wp panels, which promise a linear power output warranty (>92.5% at 25 years)? The quote I've received is for a 8.58kWp system using these panels; at 25yrs presumably the system should still be rated to 7.94kWp at least?

One of the other quotes I've received is for a slightly larger system using 400Wp Canadian Solar HiKu6 (All-Black) CS6R-400MS panels - system size is 8.8kWp, however the Canadian Solar panels are rated to 84.8% at 25yrs meaning effective system size is at a minimum 7.46kWp in 25yrs time?

If not, is it simply a case of going for the largest OR the most cost effective (€/kWh) system?

(of course I should ask how do they know at what rate their panels will degrade? It's not as if they've been around for 25yrs already. Furthermore who knows if they'll still be around in another 25yrs and how would you even go about claiming on such a warranty?)

Just got a quote there. One of the things is network pre-approval at 880 bob.

Does anyone have any idea what this is?

Thank you. It was for a 7.8kw array with 6kw inverter. I'll talk to them on Tuesday to clarify.

had my first power cut this morning post eps socket being wired in - few observations. Virgin media internet didn't work. Router stayed on but no internet connectivity. Socket worked fine though! Was able to power the tv and few bits but was only off a half hour so wasnt a big deal. Pity about the internet - need to search always on options :)