Advice / Suggestion for best use of Iboost

EricMears

bchambers233 wrote: »

I recently had panels installed along with an iBoost and it seems to be working fine. One odd thing though, i looked at the iboost the other night at about 21:00 when the inverter had switched off and bizarrely the iboost was "Heating by Solar". This cant be right as it was dark outside.

Has anyone else had similar or any suggestions

My Wattson occasionally announces that I'm generating in the middle of the night. I can only assume that it has to do with detecting a small current into the inverter - perhaps to run the fan for a few minutes - although the amount allegedly generated is usually rather higher than can easily be explained.

hubr

EricMears wrote: »

My Wattson occasionally announces that I'm generating in the middle of the night. I can only assume that it has to do with detecting a small current into the inverter - perhaps to run the fan for a few minutes - although the amount allegedly generated is usually rather higher than can easily be explained.

I found that my installer had placed the pickup coil wrongly, relative to the "Henley block" junction box. This resulted in a full 3kW going into my immersion heater, sometimes at night depending on thermostat demand. Effectively, my immersion was just operating in a 'normal mode' i.e. as if I had no solar installation at all. I replaced the pickup coil so that it was directly between the consumer unit and the "Henley block", (of course on the live cable). This corrected matters and the unit 'modulates' the power to the immersion as it should i.e. sometimes less than 3kW depending on solar levels. The instruction leaflet isn't all that clear regarding this point, when "Henley blocks" are used, and I feel sure that many other folk are duped into thinking all's well, when they're actually just using off-grid, not solar power for their immersions.

EricMears

hubr wrote: »

I found that my installer had placed the pickup coil wrongly, relative to the "Henley block" junction box.

That's not the sort of thing that's happening here. The SP Wattson probe is inside a switch unit between inverter & consumer unit so the only current passing the point is SP generation or a (very small !) supply that might be needed to allow cooling fan & electronics to run at night.