Project Solar - PV and Battery with Social Energy - Mis-sold?

Petriix

Seeing as the thread has been bumped... 
They ended up accepting the replacement battery and have finally got a smart meter installed. They've found a way of settling the finance and cutting their losses. A brutal lesson in ignoring the sales bull and doing proper research before signing anything.

stevecutbilll

Social energy do not allow you WiFi access to your battery or grid tie inverter, this is so you cannot adjust the settings on your own equipment. 

Reason, they take all your excess solar and pay you 5.6p kw they then charge your battery at 16p kw  and then watch them take it back at 5.6p. 

Watch your empty house with no electric usage actually run up a normal size bill !!

and you have no control over the equipment you bought so it’s actually useless !

nappyshock1

Has anyone left Social Energy, if so what happened with your battery? I’m enquiring on behalf of my sister in law. She wants to change supplier but is not sure what happens with the Duracell battery that came withSocial energy, she has no management access to it. She is thinking of going onto Octopus Energy’s agile tariff but would need control of the battery for this.

QrizB

Seems everyone will be leaving Social Energy, they've gone bust:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/ofgem-protects-customers-neon-reef-limited-and-social-energy-supply-ltd

(There may have been a more recent thread but the forum search isn't great ...)

Petriix

How very antisocial of them! 

Spies

stevecutbilll said:

Social energy do not allow you WiFi access to your battery or grid tie inverter, this is so you cannot adjust the settings on your own equipment. 

Reason, they take all your excess solar and pay you 5.6p kw they then charge your battery at 16p kw  and then watch them take it back at 5.6p. 

Watch your empty house with no electric usage actually run up a normal size bill !!

and you have no control over the equipment you bought so it’s actually useless !

This is going to be interesting now that they've gone bust.

Swan_Valley

Recently heard of someone being charged over £5k for a 1.4kWp system by Project Solar.

They didn't bother getting competitive quotes to compare prices so ended up getting ripped off.

nicwood

If it's of any use to anyone, it is possible to take back control of the system. 
I've been with Social Energy for a couple of years now and although not impressed with them, they didn't seem horrendous....
I had a 5.5kw system with a 4.5kw battery installed by Evergen with the Social Energy hub for £8k. The install wasn't easy with me amending some of their calculations and choosing uprated inverters etc but with the right oversight, I ended up with a system installed for less than it would have cost me to go out and buy the panels, inverters and battery myself without cabling or installation. 
I was always a bit wary based on reviews by others of Social Energy so brought the Solax WIFI dongle and Sofar WIFI dongle for both the inverters to keep an eye on things and make sure I wasn't being completely ripped off. 
When I found out they had gone bust and I was being switched to British Gas, I spoke to the installer and found out that Social Energy was actually split into two companies, the energy supply side and the 'grid trading' side. Apparently the Grid Trading side intends to keep operating and keep controlling peoples batteries however this doesn't make sense to me if they have no sight of the tariff that you're on or the pricing at various times. 
As such, I went out to the garage, powered down the system as a whole, removed all of the ethernet cables from the social energy box (the one that links them to the internet and the one that connects directly to the battery) and also popped open the top of the box and unplugged the control box inside (not recommended unless you know what you're doing and not definitely necessary). I then logged onto the solax cloud system via the wifi dongle and set the battery to 'self use' and it'll now operate entirely independently of Social Energy and retain as much power for me as possible. 

TELLIT01

The OP isn't the first to be caught out by verbal claims which aren't supported by the documentation, and won't be the last.  We got caught out by a similar situation many years ago, not on solar panels. 

I wouldn't sign up for anything now unless everything the sales person says is included in the official documentation.

Petriix

nicwood said:

If it's of any use to anyone, it is possible to take back control of the system. 
I've been with Social Energy for a couple of years now and although not impressed with them, they didn't seem horrendous....
I had a 5.5kw system with a 4.5kw battery installed by Evergen with the Social Energy hub for £8k. The install wasn't easy with me amending some of their calculations and choosing uprated inverters etc but with the right oversight, I ended up with a system installed for less than it would have cost me to go out and buy the panels, inverters and battery myself without cabling or installation. 
I was always a bit wary based on reviews by others of Social Energy so brought the Solax WIFI dongle and Sofar WIFI dongle for both the inverters to keep an eye on things and make sure I wasn't being completely ripped off. 
When I found out they had gone bust and I was being switched to British Gas, I spoke to the installer and found out that Social Energy was actually split into two companies, the energy supply side and the 'grid trading' side. Apparently the Grid Trading side intends to keep operating and keep controlling peoples batteries however this doesn't make sense to me if they have no sight of the tariff that you're on or the pricing at various times. 
As such, I went out to the garage, powered down the system as a whole, removed all of the ethernet cables from the social energy box (the one that links them to the internet and the one that connects directly to the battery) and also popped open the top of the box and unplugged the control box inside (not recommended unless you know what you're doing and not definitely necessary). I then logged onto the solax cloud system via the wifi dongle and set the battery to 'self use' and it'll now operate entirely independently of Social Energy and retain as much power for me as possible. 

That's excellent news. I'll see what I can figure out from my BIL's setup and try to do similar.