Solax advice
jamiewakeham
Forumite 92 Posts
Hi - I see a few members here have Solax inverter/battery systems and I wonder if they can help me make a decision?
I have 5.7kWp on the roof, perfectly south facing, with a 5.0kW Fronius inverter. I've done some careful modelling of electricity usage and have come to the conclusion that adding a battery is a reasonably sensible move.
I'm considering a Solax X1 hybrid inverter with a pair of 5.8kWh triple power batteries, to give me ~10kWh usable storage. That's about optimal for me; I would use most of that 10kWh on most days, but days when I will use considerably more are fairly rare.
At the moment I'm on Octopus GO, which I use to charge the car and run my heat pump to bring my thermal store up to temp on cheap of peak electricity, and I understand it's quite simple to set the Solax system to always top up during that period, so I start each day with a full battery.
My question: is Solax capable of doing cleverer things with time of use tariffs, and specifically is it clever enough to look at the pricing for Agile for the coming 24 hours and make automated decisions along the lines of 'I am at X% SoC and I can see that there's a cheap period at Y o'clock so I will hold off charging until then' ? Or is it reasonably dumb, and can only be told 'always charge between 0030 and 0430, discharge the rest of the time' ?
If the former, is it worth it, or am I likely not to see much further saving by switching from GO to Agile?
And if the latter, are there homebrew solutions that can add this sort of intelligent functionality? Fior context I am a physicist and not stupid... but I am not a programmer and if we're into the realms of needing to program a Pi or Arduino then I'll probably pass...
Thanks for any advice
Cheers
Jamie
I have 5.7kWp on the roof, perfectly south facing, with a 5.0kW Fronius inverter. I've done some careful modelling of electricity usage and have come to the conclusion that adding a battery is a reasonably sensible move.
I'm considering a Solax X1 hybrid inverter with a pair of 5.8kWh triple power batteries, to give me ~10kWh usable storage. That's about optimal for me; I would use most of that 10kWh on most days, but days when I will use considerably more are fairly rare.
At the moment I'm on Octopus GO, which I use to charge the car and run my heat pump to bring my thermal store up to temp on cheap of peak electricity, and I understand it's quite simple to set the Solax system to always top up during that period, so I start each day with a full battery.
My question: is Solax capable of doing cleverer things with time of use tariffs, and specifically is it clever enough to look at the pricing for Agile for the coming 24 hours and make automated decisions along the lines of 'I am at X% SoC and I can see that there's a cheap period at Y o'clock so I will hold off charging until then' ? Or is it reasonably dumb, and can only be told 'always charge between 0030 and 0430, discharge the rest of the time' ?
If the former, is it worth it, or am I likely not to see much further saving by switching from GO to Agile?
And if the latter, are there homebrew solutions that can add this sort of intelligent functionality? Fior context I am a physicist and not stupid... but I am not a programmer and if we're into the realms of needing to program a Pi or Arduino then I'll probably pass...
Thanks for any advice
Cheers
Jamie
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My installer is nudging me towards Solax or AlphaESS over budget brands like Pylon or Growatt. But as far as I can tell they all have more or less the same functionality, right?