I stopped exporting and set the battery to charge - didn’t for unknown reasons- I will have to ask the installer if there are settings they control that stop it!
I set the car as available- normally it prevents charging except in the cheap period - Octopus turned off charging despite a schedule saying it would.
In the end the immersion was on to deal with Legionella prevention and we boiled garden potatoes for mash.
So much for technology! If think we are being used as guinea pigs!
Phil
Yes, you cannot export and consume at the same time, but you can drain your battery prior, then max charge during the free period, but if sunny, you will be limited on the drain and the charge in your free period by the capacity of your inverter. The other way is to use loads that exceed the capacity of your your inverter.. or for us it’s usually a combination of the two.
I would have thought you could charge your EV in that period? Is that not a nice large juicy load?
Indeed just received the email..
By can, do you mean cannot?
Yes indeed cannot, spell checker removed the not … grrr
Phew! I thought you’d found a way of beating the laws of physics.
During the period 2 to 3 today, say we charged the car and used 7kWh. During that time say the PV generated 3kWh. We’d therefore import 4kW of free power, which would save us 28p, rather than charging at night. But we’d lose 45p of export, giving a net loss of 17p. I guess we could drain the batteries down beforehand, but then the amount of draining is limited by the inverter and during the morning we’ve been exporting at about 5,000W anyway. So I’ve concluded that for us it’s just not worth it.
The good news is that it’s been nice and sunny today, which will bring our production for August to just over 870kWh, which is quite a bit better than it was looking a few days ago. And we’ve had lots of rain and our plants are much happier. So it’s a win-win.
Yes, the free electricity appears not as useful in summer as in winter… as yes we are limited by the max capacity of the inverter when exporting from battery and PV.
Ive stopped getting excited by these free octopus sessions. They tend to be when there is excess solar. So unless i can go all out, i dont bother now. The faff of dumping the home battery to then top back up and playing with the charge times on my GivEnergy app mean i dont bother now. If these sessions coincide with a sunny day then the first 3 to 4Kw i use are mine already. And i can choose to just export at 15p/unit.
And if i am going all out, charging EV, home battery and pulling 15Kw, then my EV charger starts to reduce the charge rate to the EV. ( think it assumes I have a 60A cut out fuse).
I’m glad it’s not just me. I thought I was being dim and missing something obvious but it seems not, which is reassuring. I was trying to work out how to reprogram things and then decided it just wasn’t worth the effort. We’ve exported nearly 27kWh of our 31kWh generation today, so that’s good enough for me.
That’s quite a lot of export … we have had mostly a day of broken thick clouds today so not a huge amount of solar export today for us…though sunny late evening… our total generation was 22kW
When they were properly free, and 3 hours long, it could be worth the effort. But now 1 hour when your own PV is exporting well, i dont find the buggeration worth it.
A good day here too. 33.3 kWh Solar generation with 29.7 kWh exported.
Same again today so I just used the Octopus boast button for an hour.
The SolarEdge problem meant the battery didn’t charge last night. So I turned the Inverter off following the procedure and back on again. After 5-10 minutes it was all working again and a test charge worked as did the 1 hour of free electricity. We were running at 15kW and the grid dropped to 221V. I guess lots of people were helping the grid deal with too much wind and solar. I will export after 7pm.
Phil
We’ve now reached 6,000 kWh so far this year. It will be interesting to see how much more is generated in the final four months of the year.
We are just short of 5,500 kWh so far this year (15 panels totalling 6.825 kW, North Yorkshire). Our MCS figure was 5,800 kWh, so I’m reasonably confident we will beat that by year end! Of course, later years might not be as good given the very sunny spring we’ve had.
Getting back on topic, despite not having any previous years data, I’d expect 2025 to be a very good solar generation year.
Going back 3 years of data, this year has now surpassed the other two by >10%
Phil
I had 25 years of over-the-upper limit voltage to my house before I got SPEnergy to change the tappings on the nearby substation transformer. I did get to see it when they did it, and it wasn’t toroidal or made by Naim
This year is certainly proving to be a good year.
By the weekend we will have already generated as much as the whole of last year. Beating 2023 looks doable too if we have a good October.
