Solar Panels

Reed_Richards

scarletjim said:

Will I know definitively when I switch each evening from using my generated electricity to grid electricity? Can you get it to notify you daily etc, or does it not work like that?

No.  No electrical appliance knows where it gets its electricity from.  Your solar panels will supply all your electricity until the demand from the appliances in your house exceeds what the panels can supply at which point mains electricity will make-up the shortfall.  On days when clouds pass over the sun this can happen multiple times.  A battery will smooth things out a little but you'l draw electricity from the mains when panels + battery cannot supply enough and this can happen multiple times in a day. 

markin

scarletjim said:

markin said:

With solar you would want to run the AC all day anyway so come night it hardly has to work, if you let heat build up it stores in the bricks and will release over night, But i really don't believe the best way to run AC is hard at full wack just before bed, Vs light duty keeping the temp steady all day. They modulate down the power as needed, They don't use the full rating every hr they are on.

I'd guess your ac usage 24/7 for 60 days would be 480kwh, At 8kwh a day

Hmmm that's a good idea. Question related to that though: Will I know definitively when I switch each evening from using my generated electricity to grid electricity? Can you get it to notify you daily etc, or does it not work like that?

You can add a wifi addon to most inverters if its not standard or a separate monitor so you can see the data, but i think many systems have a short data update lag, So just looking at the main power meter for import is a simple way to know. Some people say they can tell just by looking out the window eventually.

QrizB

scarletjim said:

Hmmm that's a good idea. Question related to that though: Will I know definitively when I switch each evening from using my generated electricity to grid electricity?

It's fairly clear if you have a smart meter with a working in-home display. The IHD will read zero consumption while you are exporting power.

Once the sun sets and you start to import power, the consumption will show on the IHD.

rjmachin

My IHD shows in the "now" tab when and how much is being imported or exported.

scarletjim

Evan3020 said:

I generate around 4150 kwh a year and use around 2400.

Just revisiting this thread before I get time to do some more research / learning at the weekend, I noticed that your usage of generated ratio is very high compared to most people's - do you know why? You didn't mention having a battery, so I assume it's not that. Yet it seems you use nearly 58% of what you produce, whilst many people don't even reach 40%... ?

EDIT: Unless you mean your total usage is 2400, with only some of that coming from what you generate, and the rest imported?

Evan3020

I have an iboost which records how much is used each day, week, year and it reports that it sent 1309 kwh to hot water in the last year. That is 31.5% of my generation accounted for, i also have a low base load,fridge/freezer/router, etc which is taken care of by my generation and i use an oil filled radiator connected to the second iboost output that heats the radiator with any thing left after my base load and hot water is taken care of.
Need 900/1000 kwh from the grid annually.

Evan3020

Looking again i think that i use nearer to 3000 of the 4150 i generate now.

scarletjim

As a newbie to all of this, the iBoost seems to quite tricky to assess. I've seen one person say that it saved them only £7 in a whole year (!) whereas for you it must be several hundred pounds (I don't know how much fuel it is 'substituting', but that's quite a lot of generated kwh that the iBoost is using, so it must be considerable).

We have what I believe to be a 'heat only boiler' (i.e. not combi or system), a Worcester model fitted only a couple of years ago, and an Ariston hot water cylinder upstairs in the airing cupboard. It's about 15 years old, but seems to be fine. I'm currently monitoring how much gas we used to heat it. Would you or anyone here know if that made us likely candidates to significantly benefit from having iBoost, or is it not as simple as that?

Evan3020

Do you have solar panels?

scarletjim

Not yet - I'm now learning about them and researching with a view to getting them in the coming months if it makes sense to do so. I meant iBoost as part of that installation, sorry I didn't make that clear at all.