It has been an interesting day. A clear blue sky first thing which went to great and then heavy rain by mid morning.
Jan is very pleased with her front garden which is currently a riot of colour.
It’s hard to recall this was once a scrubby piece of land containing a boring lone gumtree.
She also planted daffodil bulbs in all the tree rings and with the onset of spring they have flowered.
My main activity for the day was to observe the installation of our new residential house battery. Three of the existing north facing solar panels are being moved to the west side of the roof and connected to the existing array
The remainder of the north facing panels (shown below) are being removed and replaced with ten new 440W panels. I’m keep the removed panels. They are rated at 275W and I’m thinking of installing them on the workshop along with the original inverter. They could possibly be used to power the swimming pool.
To be removed
The new inverter is rated at 10kW which is twice the capacity of the one it replaces. It also has a maximum of four solar array inputs. We currently only have two arrays and I’ve been looking at where we might install a further two.
There is only one suitable tiled area on the roof. However it’s rather small.
I could probably only fit three panels here
The other location is the steel section of patio roofing which faces north. I could potentially have eight panels fitted here which would give us another 3.5kW
The battery wouldn’t fit in the planned location in the garage. The supplier said it would but didn’t realise there was an adjacent door. I opted to have it located on the opposite garage wall.
It’s a Sigenergy, Sigstor modular battery. I opted for four 8kWh stacked modules giving us a total of 32kWh of storage. Hopefully it will store enough electricity to keep the house supplied for 2-3 days.
2 comments :
We had a Sigenergy system installed earlier this year and have 24kWh of battery, we've not droped below 65% capacity yet but winter is coming so happy to be on a cheap tariff for night time charging when needed, we also had the gateway fitted which has been triggered twice so far so really happy with that, we liked the modular system and like you went for the 8kWh modules, it's a neat system, we've linked our original solar (4kWh) through to get paid for the 'deemed' export along with the new panels (7.650kWh) I'm sure you'll be pleased with it
Hello Caroline & Martin,
Our cheap tariff period is during the day (9 - 4pm) as this is when the most solar electricity is being produced. Because we opted for a 10kW inverter we are prohibited from exporting to the grid. But then the feed in tariff rate is only $0.02 per kWh. I'd rather retain and store/consume our own electricity with the eventual aim of disconnecting from the grid. I suspect our biggest issue might be having sufficient solar to keep the battery fully recharged. Time will tell.
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