"Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it."

Cheery_Daff

Hope your shed is tall enough for an IBC! They're surprisingly huge 😂 I had to dig into the ground to get mine low enough to take the water from the greenhouse guttering, and then dig a lower hole to put the watering can in 😂😂

greenbee

The shed is tall enough - I just need to clean them up and move them over there, and then work out the connections and taps... but I think I'm going to be able to automate the watering of the veg plot as a result. I have four, so I'm hoping that I'll get a pretty good system set up. The greenhouse already has two slimline butts on it, and will have one more added at the other end. 

Cheery_Daff

Excellent, that sounds like an ideal setup!

greenbee

It’s going to take some time to sort out Cheery, but as long as it’s set up for next year, that’s fine. Getting the IBCs is the most important bit, and will save me spending a fortune on more water butts! 

Apparently my solar export tariff kicks in today (I’m impressed by the speed at which it has happened as the installation was only finished on Wednesday!), which could be why it has clouded over. However, even without much sun I’m still running the house, charging the battery, heating the water and exporting a little. A lot of the time now I’m not using the grid - oddly it seems to kick in with low usage at night rather than just running off the battery. I need to try to track down what’s driving it, as the battery can definitely support the overnight demand (it delivers more power at times during the day). 

Today is bin day, and annoyingly the scaffolding is in the way so I have to drag the bins all the way round to the other gate and across the drive. But it’s also an opportunity to get rid of some of the bits of carpet in the garage. 

greenbee

Scaffolding is gone, bins were filled up with more carpet and odd bits of loft board, but not much else has been done as I had a migraine yesterday which wrote it off, and is doing a good job of writing today off too. 

Heating engineer came yesterday, and the pressure reducing valve for the cold water needs replacing, which he'll do next week. 

I need to have a word with the electricians about the earthing of the solar panels, as the wire runs along the edge of the drive into the flowerbed. Which would be fine, but it's not fixed down, so I can't see it surviving long. I can see it might have been difficult to do with the scaffolding up, but it's not feasible as a permanent solution.  The other electricians have now (FINALLY) sent in their bill... so I will consider how long to take to pay it (maybe as long as it took them to produce it?). 

Carpenter is taking forever to get the shed/summerhouse done. He'd originally said he'd come in the evenings after work as well as on Saturdays, but so far has only managed one evening. Thankfully he isn't coming this Saturday so I can actually spend some time in the garden, but at the same time it would be nice if he'd just get on and get the job finished. His grandmother is coming over on Monday, but that doesn't seem to have motivated him to get it done!

Veg plot is productive - I have beans and mange tout that I need to freeze today, and more courgettes to cook for the freezer when I'm feeling a bit more human. 

As far as the solar goes, I need to decide whether I'm going to put the effort into optimizing it (which means linking it all to Apple Home Kit via IFFT) or just let it do it's own thing. While having all the myenergi stuff means it works together really well, the app is limited, and I'm struggling to work out how to tell it to prioritise discharging the battery between 5pm and 7pm (and to avoid using the grid), and from then until 2am when it should charge at cheap rate (as the cheap rate units are cheaper than I get paid for my solar during the day). I probably should have done more research and specified exactly what I wanted in terms of components, but I'd started to lose the will to live... At some point I'll see how easy it would be to add microdiverters for the electric towel rails and any electric UFH that goes into the bathrooms. Probably an expensive way to do it, but might be worth it in the long term. My export tariff is currently showing as Flexible Octopus, which isn't an export tariff, so hopefully that will correct itself soon. I'm quite looking forward to my August electricity bill, so I can start to calculate what the real payback period is likely to be!

badmemory

Whilst I am not on a smart meter yet let alone a suitable tariff - I am expecting my current provider to throw a wobbler when I enter my meter readings on the 16th as I do every month.  Mine were actually installed on the 16th so the next reading will be all solar panel time.  I normally use around 20kwh per day & since the panels have been using between 2 & 3 from the grid. 

I expect the next 8 months or so will not be quite so good.  I have already exported over 230kwh that I won't get paid for.  In the coming months I am going to have to figure out the optimum time for the forced import.  Well they say as you get older you should learn something new.  As my panels are guaranteed for 25 years I fully expect them to outlive me, although I would quite like to live to 103 provided my brain is still functioning at a decent capacity.

greenbee

I've managed to set mine up for the forced import (putting the tariff into the app), and tested it, so it works. I've turned it off now, as I'm not using all the stored solar. However, the bit that's going to take work is the force export, as that currently has to be done manually. It's not a bad time for me, as I'm still working then, so can make sure everything other than my office is off between 4pm and 7pm on weekdays - although I need to do the maths to make sure that filling in the night and discharging at peak times makes me more money that using the battery myself after 7pm. It may be that I just want to discharge a portion of it. There's bound to be a third party app somewhere that can do all this - the people on the Green & Ethical board here have lots of great ideas, but I'm not sure I want to put that much effort into it (yet). If I could work out how to automate it would be worth putting more panels on over time (possibly even second-hand ones to max out the export over summer) as my export licence is unlimited. 

I've only exported 45.8 kWh so far (but only 6.4 kWh since being metered), but if it wasn't for yesterday's cheap-rate import experiment I'd only be using around 1kWh/day from the grid which is basically what you have to consume to keep in sync with the grid when not exporting (I did wonder why the overnight consumption was pretty much evenly split between grid and battery), and when the battery doesn't kick in quite quickly enough for whatever has increased consumption. 

It's nearly as much of a time-wasting activity as the cats  

badmemory

I'm sure eventually we just go - right that's done move on.  But for now fascinating.  Let's face it anything we don't have to pay to an energy company is a bonus.  I'm sure in a couple of months my spreadsheet will be totally ignored.  When my battery has some in it during the night it hasn't used any from the grid.  I did notice though that any high usage items seem to be unable to take enough from the battery.  So my 8.5kwh shower on a really good day would take 4 from the solar & max 3.9 from the battery & the rest from the grid.  The same sort of thing seems to happen with the 3kwh kettle & anything higher power.  It seems to throw a wobbler.

greenbee

I think it has something to do with the inverter - I have a 5kW inverter, so I'm guessing that max output from the battery is going to be 5kW. It sounds like you have a slightly smaller one. Clearly you can now only have showers when the sun is shining! I get tiny blips occasionally when something turns on. I need to work out how to download my data and put it into spreadsheets to play with - but it looks like I only use a tiny amount of power overnight and it's 50/50 battery and grid. I wonder whether the software starts to learn how you use energy and adapt? So far today I've only used 1.6kWh from the battery and it's 96% full, so in theory I could discharge to the grid right now at peak export rate time, but I want to be sure that my export tariff is correctly set up first. And start to learn how much I need to last my through from 7pm to 2am on an average night (and calculate whether it's better to hang on to my battery charge and export solar or to discharge and recharge on cheap rate). I think the night-time cheap rate will matter more in the winter, as that's when you'll want to charge the battery and run the washing machine and immersion etc. 

greenbee

ooh... my export tariff has just corrected. This week I have exported (not sure when the last reading went through, sometime yesterday by the looks of things) £1.03, and imported £0.94. 

So if I can work out what battery % I need to retain for overnight use, I can discharge at peak rate (I'm currently exporting during peak period as I'm at work - listening to a webinar ) manually. If you have a GivEnergy battery you can let Octopus manage it on their Intelligent Flux tariff, but unfortunately they don't currently appear to support other batterie.