Solar Stats #4 - April 24th 2023
Reading time: 2 minutes (280 words)Author: @pugmiester
Tags: solar , energy , battery , stats
System specs
16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week
I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
A reasonable generation week with just over 100kWh
The start of the week was certainly better with Monday to Wednesday up around the 20kWhs of generation per day but then the weather turned much more overcast for the second half of the week with most of the remaining days below 10kWh per day. We still imported a chunk overnight on Octopus GO to keep the battery topped up.
I still have work to do on the solar forecast as switching to Solcast directly in the GivTCP integration seems to be making no difference to the battery filling to 100% overnight regardless of the solar forecast for the next day. More work required to understand what’s going on.
We still exported around half of what we generated and I’m still kicking myself for not adding a second battery when we had the solar system installed to soak up the excess. The system will support up to 5 batteries connected to the same inverter but thanks to our wonderfull government rules we would have to pay VAT at 20% on top of the purchase price for an extra battery. There’s zero VAT if you install one at the same time as installing a solar system. It’s almost as if they don’t want to encourage you to be able to store your own energy instead of buying the expensive fossil fueled stuff instead. Mini rant over.