Mike's ext'n & renovation (solar panels)

[Mike G]

John what is this diverter/immersion heater device? Can you drop a link to one please? All our water is heated by lecky on an overnight tariff . I have no idea what the regs are here but would like to investigate as we have a large south facing roof and running cable down from the roof through two concrete floors to where the hot water tank is located is a lot easier than plumbing pipes .

The cable doesn't necessarily need to get to the tank (mine doesn't). If the immersion is on its own circuit, you can join into that existing circuit wherever is convenient......in my case, at the consumer unit.

 

[John Brown]

MyEnergi EDDI 2.1 Eco-Smart Solar Power Energy Diverter - EDDI-16A1P02H https://share.google/zsJAoVkBP98ZJIQcY

Other makes/models also exist.

 

[AndyP]

Thanks Matt, as Mike has pointed out as the water heater is on its on circuit (breaker) on the consumer unit the diverter, IIUC, is not required. A little knowledge is always useful when dealing with stuff way outside my knowledge base. We will have to have a quote sooner or later and then weigh that up with our long term plans for remaining in this house.

 

[Mike G]

Thanks Matt, as Mike has pointed out as the water heater is on its on circuit (breaker) on the consumer unit the diverter, IIUC, is not required. A little knowledge is always useful when dealing with stuff way outside my knowledge base. We will have to have a quote sooner or later and then weigh that up with our long term plans for remaining in this house.

The diverter IS required, but in the opposite way to normal. It works when the hot water cylinder is full of hot water (to temperature), and it then diverts the output of the panels to the house.

 

[John Brown]

Andy the one we have is a Marlec Solar iBoost. It’s pretty pricey for what is a very simple piece of kit using old technology. For this to work you need panels and inverter to feed electricity into your house /grid. Not quite sure on how Mike’s is set up but that would be an off the shelf solution.

It's not that simple, some of them can dump as little as 150w into a 3kw immersion heater, and measuring the exported power isn't as simple as one might imagine. Still overpriced, though, I agree.

 

[Mike G]

.........measuring the exported power isn't as simple as one might imagine.....

The reading on my inverter and the reading on the little screen thingy we've got in the house are in the order of 10 to 15% different. They are measuring exactly the same thing, the installer tells me. So yeah......you're dead right.

 

[Phil]

Looks good Mike.
I do realise we get a bit more sun than you do
We installed 10 x 500w panels, 8 kW inverter and 2 x 5 Kw batteries. The batteries are fully charged by 11:00am even in winter. Wife does a lot of baking and knows how to time that that with the battery %. We have run out of battery power on very overcast rainy days, the system then draws from the grid.
We run the whole house off this including hot water.
There is a hot water pump for the geyser which runs for about 30 to 45 minutes per day, 200 litre geyser for 2 of us. There is a switch to change from pump to grid.
My electricity bill per month is about ZAR40.00 about GBP1.80 however we cannot feed back to the grid (stupid 5th rate local council!)

 

[JamesHow]

Looks good Mike.
I do realise we get a bit more sun than you do
We installed 10 x 500w panels, 8 kW inverter and 2 x 5 Kw batteries. The batteries are fully charged by 11:00am even in winter. Wife does a lot of baking and knows how to time that that with the battery %. We have run out of battery power on very overcast rainy days, the system then draws from the grid.
We run the whole house off this including hot water.
There is a hot water pump for the geyser which runs for about 30 to 45 minutes per day, 200 litre geyser for 2 of us. There is a switch to change from pump to grid.
My electricity bill per month is about ZAR40.00 about GBP1.80 however we cannot feed back to the grid (stupid 5th rate local council!)

Roughly how much did your set up cost if you don't mind me asking?

 

[John Brown]

Choosing an Energy Diverter — OpenEnergyMonitor 0.0.1 documentation

For anyone who's interested...


I can see how doing it the other way round could be easier - dump everything into the water heaters, and once they reach set temperature, divert power to grid tied inverter. No messing switching transients to deal with, you could even run the heaters on DC...

 

[RogerS]

There is an excellent thread here https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/threads/diy-powerwall-battery.148821/ on making a very cost-effective system. I intend to make one sometime in the future.

 

[Phil]

Roughly how much did your set up cost if you don't mind me asking?

An overseas holiday of about 8k, there is no payback in our lifetime. (X-rate of 22:1)
There are additional breakers and surge protectors. I can also run the generator to charge the batteries. On a power outage we run cables to next door for her fridge & freezer.
A couple of years ago the local sub-station burnt down and we had no power for nearly 10 days, that is when I bought the generator.
We installed due to continuous power shedding by national supplier, also for wife convenience when I die 'tomorrow'
Our other 1.5 overseas holidays is on son & DIL roof, larger system than ours.

 

[Mike G]

.......A couple of years ago the local sub-station burnt down and we had no power for nearly 10 day.....

What Phil hasn't told you, folks, is that South Africa has an electricity generation crisis, which has been going on for a decade or more. Actually probably closer to 20 years. Their monopoly provider is known universally as "Eish-kom" (it's real name is Eskom), and they have a permanent set of rolling black-outs known for some reason as "load shedding". There is reputed to be a lot of corruption in the system. The net effect is that those who can afford to get some form of energy independance do so, and things like payback periods are just moot. Phil has a solar system to be sure of being able to run his fridge and his lights, rather than to save a few quid here and there.

 

[Phil]

What Phil hasn't told you, folks, is that South Africa has an electricity generation crisis, which has been going on for a decade or more. Actually probably closer to 20 years. Their monopoly provider is known universally as "Eish-kom" (it's real name is Eskom), and they have a permanent set of rolling black-outs known for some reason as "load shedding". There is reputed to be a lot of corruption in the system. The net effect is that those who can afford to get some form of energy independance do so, and things like payback periods are just moot. Phil has a solar system to be sure of being able to run his fridge and his lights, rather than to save a few quid here and there.

You are soooooooooooooooo right!
Corruption is nearly just about a government initiative.

We have also just changed the service provider who buys the power from the council and sells to the owners. Their admin fee is ZAR10.00 lower than the previous crowd.

Ok chaps, back in line, and lets not hijack MG's thread.

 

[Dr.Al]

As with Mike's workshop build thread, I've extracted this thread (including almost all of the missing imgur images). However, there are rather a lot of them (6332) and hence the resulting file size is a bit big (1.3 GB, of which most is the images). I don't really want to stick that on my google drive (especially not with two copies, a zip file and a PDF), so I've generated the (1 GB) PDF and then rescaled it to make a much smaller one with lower image resolution.

I've got all the imgur images on the laptop's hard disk, so if the moderators would like a copy to shove on the server then please let me know and I'll find somewhere to share them temporarily.

In the meantime, if you can face a 3879 page PDF () and want to read this thread with (low-ish resolution versions of) the images in context, then click here.

 

[Mike G]

As with Mike's workshop build thread, I've extracted this thread (including almost all of the missing imgur images). However, there are rather a lot of them (6332) and hence the resulting file size is a bit big (1.3 GB, of which most is the images). I don't really want to stick that on my google drive (especially not with two copies, a zip file and a PDF), so I've generated the (1 GB) PDF and then rescaled it to make a much smaller one with lower image resolution.

I've got all the imgur images on the laptop's hard disk, so if the moderators would like a copy to shove on the server then please let me know and I'll find somewhere to share them temporarily.

In the meantime, if you can face a 3879 page PDF () and want to read this thread with (low-ish resolution versions of) the images in context, then click here.

Al, I've reported your post so that the mods can take any appropriate action they see fit with your efforts. I don't have a clear picture of what you've done, but I am extremely grateful you've done it. Thanks hugely.