My recently fitted system cost £5850 for 8 integrated panels with inverter and a diverter for an immersion heater but no battery. Rated at 3kw and have regularly seen over 2.8kw - very pleased considering the time of year. There were no scaffold costs as the roof was being done at the same time but the integrated panels would have cost more than the normal type. All up and running about 5 weeks after ordering - they are out there!
My home solar/battery system, was £13.7k for an 8kW array (22 panels) and a 13kW FOX ESS battery. That was fitted earlier this year (panels in May, batteries hooked up in July - delay on getting hold of a 3-phase inverter, apparently).
Based on some of the prices quoted above, it seems to have increased in price significantly in the last few months.
I have just left a Facebook solar group (due to the spectacular volume of posts on it) and prices have been significantly higher for the last 6-8 months or so.
I haven’t had any new quotes for a while (got some from April to June) and am finding it very difficult to get help with a tricky installation (we already have a share of a wind turbine and want to add solar and battery but integrating it all seems beyond most quoters).
2021 would have been a better time to get solar than 2022, but with interest rates and inflation jumping maybe 2023 will be better 
We finally had another clear day after 7 weeks of mostly cloudy or wet days (not a great spring so far) and we are 2 months away from the longest day now. So hit 43.3kWh production, the first time over 40 
. With daylight savings we have generation to cover our afternoon spa and cooking, and with cool mornings are still running a heat pump before 8am and we use our free hour of power for most of that from 6 - 7am. On these figures and the amount of exported power, that will be covering our daily power costs, including the daily charge. That’s a great outcome and I’m hoping the 6 months each side of summer will be great for solar generation.
The curve is quite interesting as we have NE (8 panels) and NW (15 panel) arrays. We get two peaks, with the first at 10:30am and the second around 4pm when the sun is directly above the larger NW array.
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This might have already been asked… I did a few searches on the posts but to no avail. Sorry if it’s repeating the question.
Anyway, all these solutions use an ‘app’ which communicates through a cloud server. Are there any provisions in place whereby the cloud server/company running the server will be assured for the life of the installation?
A question being asked by a bloke in the office who is going through the planning of a roof solar EV setup. He’s asked the question to three installers and got no answer.
Im not surprised that the installers didn’t answer. I certainly dont have any such assurances or provisions in my agreement and I doubt anyone would - it places too high a burden
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So… do you need the app/cloud for the systems to operate? If the ‘cloud’ dies, does the hardware carry on working?
yes it would carry on working, the app is merely displaying the data from the system, as opposed to operating the PV.
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The apps rely on the cloud server being in place, my inverter can operate disconnected from ‘the cloud’ and I believe there is a local network monitoring option (but I think I’d need to build my own app for this).
The inverter will probably wear out in ten or so years but it’s easily replaced by another from another manufacturer.
Should I change the inverter to another brand, I’ll have a different cloud service to monitor consumption.
So, no, there’s no guarantee the monitor service continues to run but even disconnected from the cloud the system runs, and should I want to change settings I can do that directly through the front panel (but it’s more convenient over the cloud.!)
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Apparently the new design of panels have an inverter per panel. So you might end up with half the panels/inverters on one service and the remainder on a different service?
I think you may be referring to micro inverters or optimised inverters- in any event they would be on the same service - as they all come together to connect to your electricity supply/meter
Okay… so you can have several different makes of micro inverters but all communicating with the same ‘cloud’ service?
I think the question is why would you? I think it might be possible but Im not certain, you would only have different makes of micro inverters for example if you installed a second PV system at a future date and technology had moved on since when the first installation was carried out.
Microinverters connect to a single inverter which in turn is connected to the meter box
I think you might be overplaying the role of the “cloud” in all of this, its all about electrical wiring and connections to the metered supply
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I was theorising what happens when a panel_inverter goes … up.
I am new to this game, so new that I haven’t ordered anything yet and I was wondering if anyone has found a useful app or facility that can calculate the appropriate size of PV and battery storage to suit a particular application?
Apologies if this has been asked before.
No knowledge of anything, but I’d say generally fill your roof with panels (assuming they face in the right direction) - that’s almost a no brainer. Batteries then really depend on your houses usage, and there are so many factors that influence this. If you don’t have batteries, then a solar diverter is a no brainer in my opinion
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I don’t think it helps with battery sizing - you really need to analyse your usage in order to determine appropriate battery size and cost/savings
Many solar installers in my part of the world use opensolar software to forecast solar production for a particular location
A few, not that structured, thoughts also only based on about two months of using a battery connected to an inverter and one month of the panels being connected:
I first looked at my consumption and thought that if I had sufficient battery to provide ‘about’ half my consumption that would be ‘ok’. Then I did some numbers and realised that this wouldn’t, necessarily, be cost effective and relied very much on ‘offsetting’ my usage from a peak rate of ‘around’ 30p to a cheap rate of ‘around’ 7.5p; should the cheap tariff be withdrawn I wasn’t sure how much of the year I’d get enough sun to charge the battery. I ended up going for around 25%-30% of my daily use in battery capacity because of pricing.
Thoughts:
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My use is very ‘lumpy’. When I charge the car/do laundry/heat water/cook large amounts of electricity are used. When I am just listening to music/reading/watching TV relatively small amounts are used.
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My solar panels cover my usage most of the the time during daylight hours, it’s only during my peak consumption time that they don’t (and the battery helps bolster the panels at these times to avoid drawing from the mains, although that does rely on there being enough sun to recharge the battery afterwards…).
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Cooking an evening meal using the oven will result in the battery being exhausted before the evening is over. However a larger battery isn’t necessarily the answer since on a dull day there wouldn’t have been enough sun to charge the additional battery.
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Charging the battery from the mains overnight helps me time-shift usage between cheap and expensive supply but if I go into the day with a charged battery I miss the opportunity to get ‘free’ electricity since I’ve already filled the battery with ‘cheap’ electricity in an attempt to avoid buying ‘expensive’ electricity! Looking at weather forecasts has not worked well here (deciding how much charge to put in the battery overnight) and I tend to just put about 1kWh (roughly 20% of capacity) into the battery during ‘cheap’ time, although I suspect as the days shorten that will increase.
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What’s really key to making best use of the solar system is shifting my pattern of usage to be during the time that the sun is shining, so where in the past laundry/dishwashing was done overnight on cheap-rate electricity now it’s done during ‘peak sun’ once the battery is charged and I start to export.
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A solar ‘diverter’ would make sense and I suspect I’ll fit one eventually, but at the moment manually switching on the immersion heater when there’s plenty of sun, the battery is charged and I’m exporting electricity works well enough.
If I were buying again I think I would have gone for a larger battery; the 5.6kWh one is just about enough at the moment to avoid drawing from the mains during the evening (I enable its discharging from mid-day), but this is based on consumption of ‘around’ 15kWh/day ignoring the car charging.
On panels, whilst 3 or 4kWh may be a useful amount during sunny days, it’s on dull days where a larger array would come into its own, especially if the roof is poorly aligned and it would be possible to have one ‘string’ for the morning and another for the afternoon; I think @Mike_S showed this nicely in his message 4 days back.
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Those are great observations Stephen. Load shifting is certainly a key part in getting the best from a system. We work from home, so a lot of use is during the day anyway.
Sizing a battery is tricky. We have only had our system for 4 months, but already I know that we only have a maximum daily export of 10kWh in a good winters day and even now, 2 months before mid-summer we are importing 10 to 15kWh per day. This would suggest that a battery over 10kWh won’t be fully utilised, other than running over a second wet day in summer.
My model using my weather station shows that in September the export would have been 90kWh but by October we would be a net importer.
Even in June the battery could have had as much as 9kWh/day being drawn from it. Either side there was more than 30kWh being exported!
I think the battery allows one to consider smart peak time selling to the grid as well as smoothing out domestic peaks and troughs.
For the winter half year it helps make the most of ones Solar production. It also allows one to buy off peak.
Phil