Solar panels and battery - any real world reccomendations?

Nathan said:
I looked at this but planning was needed over 3m wide and they have to be 5m from a boundary which is just stupid. A doctor in my village has a nice ground array, his planning took a while though. makes 100kwh a day
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Make the poles 7 foot taller, put boards on the side and a door in one end and it becomes a shed with solar panels on the roof ;)
 
Ron-ski said:
Did you get the installer to run the numbers? It would be interesting as to what the result is.
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No but there was a video I watched about a north facing solar array a company done and it was producing ~50% that you would expect, ill see if I can dig up the video, they said they would do a follow up video but it hasn't been installed too long but he responded to a comment I made asking.

Edit
This was the video and for the comment the person that replied said it was performing at 50% of the south array.

youtu.be

Will solar work on a north roof? Newcastle installation Part 1

In this video we run through out latest solar install in Newcastle. This one is a bit different though and includes panels on the north and south roof. We ta...
youtu.be youtu.be

Edit 2
My bad, he said just over, but that was on good days, probably not enough data yet for any long term guessing.
 
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Depends on angles and time of year. 50% sounds highly optimistic. Maybe at noon during mid summer, if the roof ngle is fairly shallow.

I think there's a site that can work that all out for you.
 
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Nathan said:
I looked at this but planning was needed over 3m wide and they have to be 5m from a boundary which is just stupid. A doctor in my village has a nice ground array, his planning took a while though. makes 100kwh a day
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Building mine off the side of my greenhouse, will add some shade for the growing area and provide energy for the house. If anyone complains and the council want me to remove it, then it will be an X in their box come voting time....simple as that
 
Ron-ski said:
@alphaomega16 I think a north facing array will perform better when its cloudy, the cloud diffuses the light, and we get a lot of clouds in the winter, but it needs to be the right sort of clouds, not too thick!
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My experience (which is limited to an Eastern array at 45 degrees) is 50 % would be unachievable unless the roof angle is Ultra low. I suspect the house in Newcastle was about 25 degrees. Once my panels are in complete shade, performance falls off very fast. In the winter especially, but this applies all year round, the panels all have similar outputs when it is overcast, so in those conditions north and south output will be the same. With quite a lot of panels it is easier for us to get them to produce what we need as a base level, so in that sense, north panels are not terrible, even if the payback is.
 
Bug One said:
Depends on angles and time of year. 50% sounds highly optimistic. Maybe at noon during mid summer, if the roof ngle is fairly shallow.

I think there's a site that can work that all out for you.
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Indeed its going to be even more peaky than a normal array.

In the summer the sun rises in the NE and sets in the NW. So you at least should see some direct sun even if at an angle.
In winter in rises in the SE and sets in the SW. No direct sun at all, for months! (Would probably end up covered in moss depending on angle)
 
Welshman said:
Building mine off the side of my greenhouse, will add some shade for the growing area and provide energy for the house. If anyone complains and the council want me to remove it, then it will be an X in their box come voting time....simple as that
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You do get that the planning/BC people are civil servants so care 0 for your views on your elected represenatives whose policies they ignore anyway!
I still say crack on though.
 
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SBo said:
You do get that the planning/BC people are civil servants so care 0 for your views on your elected represenatives whose policies they ignore anyway!
I still say crack on though.
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they care about local councillors though.......put the council seats as independents and then no party lines to tow, which mean they will change policy/procedure......planning has been changed here due to independent councillors being brought to the table. Especially in housing and infrastructure.

as for the ground mount, its being connected to the green house thats already in place, so already an existing structure
 
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My panels have gone on and I'm just waiting for the install to complete inside with the battery.

I'm using a 9.5k Givenergy batt. What is some good simple software I can use to get an idea of how my setup is working out? Bear in mind I don't do coding, and some of the setups I've seen the guys running in production figures is way over my head. Just something basic to get an idea of how it's working out?
 
And if you want to go up a notch HomeAssistant running on a Pi is brilliant to automate your home around solar and anything else…
 
BMS was changed Tues but after dumping the batteries the system didn't record my "mode" change so yesterday they started the day at 10% SOC (minimum)
They trickled in most of the day and ended up at a high of 29%. That obviously drained out once the sun went down.

I figured actually if the BMS is going to fix the issue its got a chance to do so at that rate.

Force charged last night and we are back to the same, 1.667 hours of charge (approx) at 5475 = around 9.1kwh into battery to get to 100% SOC.
Exactly the same as before.

8 days into the 14 day complaint window I need to give them per MCS
 
Not bad. Looking forward to getting the internals done.

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Is there a good calculator for working out for example the number of panels by their KW output, the size of battery and then howucj extra I might generate after the battery is full? If indeed I can fill it?
 
DampCat said:
Is there a good calculator for working out for example the number of panels by their KW output, the size of battery and then howucj extra I might generate after the battery is full? If indeed I can fill it?
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Just wait for a sunny day without any real breaks, you'll get an idea what your max is around this time of year.

Nothing beats real world numbers really.

Join the pvoutput team if you can get home assistant running as well, will allow you to compare to other systems at various points in the day as well as overall.

Live Outputs

PVOutput.org - share, compare and monitor live solar photovoltaic output data
pvoutput.org
 
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