To optimise or not

Merlin139

I am so glad I went with SolarEdge and Optimisers because I was looking at around 14% shading. This is mostly caused by the house next door. Starting to cast a shadow on my panels West to East that starts to move across them from around 16:30 at Mid summer. Without it I would have lost a large chuck of generation.

I also have 3 panels that are effected by other items. TV Ariel at the eastern end of my roof. Individual monitoring has been able to show the difference between my best and worse panel.  2.24 MWh and 1.84 MWh   

They also showed me where the problem was when I lost production for 3 days. Very easy to look at the data to see which panel was causing the problem.

For me it was an easy decision.

Martyn1981

mcn99 said:

9.6k for 9kw system with water heating diverter, non solar edge invertor.

1.3k extra for solar edge invertor/optimisers

Hiya. This is a good time of the year to look at shading, as during the summer the sun may well be high in the sky for most of the time it's 'seeing' your roof.

Perhaps have a look every few hours, starting 30-60mins after sunrise, and ending 30-60mins before sunset, and see how much shade is being thrown on the roof, both in area and time.

If you think it's significant now, then perhaps the Solaredge system may be worth it. Both my systems are Solaredge and it's absolutely brilliant at doing what it's designed to do, which is minimizing the impact of shade on any individual panels, from pulling down total generation, but if you don't have enough shade, perhaps 10-20%+, then might not be worth it.

Just to clarify, if the roof got 10% shading all day, with the shade travelling acrossing it, then you would want Solaredge, as the impact of that shade could be much more than 10% as it can act as a drag on the whole system.

Lastly, the price seems a bit high, ideally you'd want to be under £1k/kWp by about 5kWp, so for 9kWp, I'd have thought £8k with Solaredge would be reasonable, perhaps £7k without, unless it's a particularly complex/difficult job?

Verdigris

Funnily enough this  thread prompted me to look at Street View of the gaff I'm buying. There are some trees across the road, although not directly, and as luck would have it Google did the road again when the house went on the market (you can see the for sale sign). Also, it was early in the year (no leaves on the trees) but sunny, so I am pretty sure the shadows won't extend far enough to cause problems.

Exiled_Tyke

As usual Martyn is absolutely right.  Eeeking the most out of the 'shoulder' months is one case where optimisers really make a difference.  In the height of summer you may not have a shading issue at all and may well have more electricity production to care. In the dead of winter there is next to no production to improve on. However Autumn and Spring is where you will discover shading you never thought about and optimisers will help.  To stress it really is a case of not dragging the whole string down

mcn99

I have finally decided not to optimise. After having another chat with installer, he thought roof shading did not merit extra cost

As for price, you have to realise current situation, demand has soared. Perhaps in 6 months time I could get a better price but just getting someone to turn up and quote was difficult enough

Thanks again for all your comments