That’s interesting to know. We generated a third of that - 308.6kw on a 2.8kw system so that seems very much in line with your system which is 8kw if you do the maths. I expect the slight difference can be explaned by you having panels on 2 elevations whereas ours all face the same way.
It’s reassuring to compare as it’s a useful check that the systems are performing correctly. I expect we had similar levels on sunshine given how good the weather has been.
In May it only took 3 days to exceed the total generation for December 2024!
Yep looks good, on our E7 based 4kW (5kW pk) system our 20th April monthly was
Really pleased… at this rate (May export is forecast to be £90 to £100), our electricity bill could be between 0 and £200 pounds for the whole year)
Are you now dumping the battery each evening?
Following your advice, yes I am. I’ve set it to dump for 3.5 hours, which will do about 10kWh depending on what the house is using. Dumping in the evening and buying it back in the early hours makes us about 80p a day, or £24 a month for doing nothing. It feels like a bit of a scam but everyone does it and the tariffs positively encourage it.
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Indeed, alas on E7, the buy and payback is 12.09p/kWh and export is 15p/kWh, so by the time you factor conversion losses, the amount you make is minimal against the increased wear and tear on the battery.
Now when I get an EV.. with an EV tariff it will be a different story…
Ok, good. I justify dumping/buying back arrangement ( if i have to) is to cover the standing charge.
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The EV tarrif makes it worthwhile. 15p export, 7p to buy back.
As you know, we have a heat pump and no gas at all. We’ve set our monthly DD at £35, which should cover car charging too. It will be interesting to see if that’s enough. Maybe it will prove too much but I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Or 16.5p and 6.7p (7 hours) respectively on E.ON 
I hear rumours with E.ON that export metering has to be done manually, and exports are not paid directly into your electricity account to offset imports…
Is that right… it all sounds old school so it doesn’t sound correct. Interested to hear your thoughts.
I do have to give “EON Next” the figures every quarter, as they don’t seem able to get it from the meter, even though I can see it on the meter. The moneys are paid separately into your bank. I am a FIT customer though, and whether that’s different for others, I do not know
Indeed. You need to send in your meter’s export reading periodically to get paid direct to your bank account. Old school, yes, but it means they can’t restrict you to an EV or charger make/model as Octopus do for Go and Intelligent Go. So, for solar/battery users with no EV it’s ideal. Better than Octopus rates and no restrictions. So I’m OK with the ‘hassle’ of getting paid for exports. YMMV.
Best generation day yet, 42kWh. Peter, who fitted it all, told me today that we should hit 60 in high summer and 8,000kWh per year. I think that’s over ambitious but who knows?
Good stuff, our best day so far was the 9th May, with 36.5 kWh generation, though we are now occasionally just clipping the inverter when all three mini arrays (E/S/W) are strongly active and the generation spikes up when the sun is high around 1pm and it’s not hazy which is usually is here in the east, so I am only expecting modest increases until the solstice (about 7 weeks away)
Joking aside, that would significantly affect the power generated. I remember reading that even the shadow of an overhead telephone wire across one panel reduces the electricity generation noticeably.
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I’ve just done a calculation on how much extra I can make from exports if I turn off my HiFi for say a short holiday. Looks like I will earn a massive 5.6p per day currently. So if I go away for 90 days, I can probably afford an extra pint - yeh!
Likewise for us, though the peak is at around 7kW, when it can go to about 8.2kW on an ideal day:
I think it depends on whether you using newer panel tech with optimisers, if so they tend to be very tolerant of partial shading. Common shading examples include guano..
Anyone i know who has had PV installed in the last 3? years has had microinverters fitted to their panels.
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Yeah micro inverters are quite unusual around my parts for domestic setups with batteries, unless you have large arrays or arrays some distance away from your inverter such as large ground arrays - in fact part of my family runs quite a large business providing and installing renewable energy solutions for domestic and now mostly commercial premises, I was going to go initially micro inverters as that was a big thing a few years ago but was advised it’s probably not the best approach for my sort of setup. Things have moved on in recent years, mine is a new installation as of last October. Centralised hybrid inverters seem to work well with batteries where you have a DC only bus and are ideal for single phase relatively modest (domestic) deployments up to about 7.5 kW to 9kW peak generation where the panels are relatively close to the inverter and I don’t have more than 10 panels in a chain.
When I looked into it - the DC chain method looked most cost effective for my modest setup, and marginally more efficient for AC generation, and more efficient for battery charging.
I use DC chains with DC optimisers on each panel - seems to work well - which provide many of the benefits of AC micro inverters but with slightly greater efficiency..
If I add a ground array at some point - I will likely use microinverters for that.
