A blog post about my London-based solar panels and battery.
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Some interesting data, although given the high initial cost of installation I feel those “we paid only 1£” are a bit misplaced.
Anyways, I finally scraped together some money and also got a 5kw LiFePO4 battery system yesterday. Still need to install everything DIY, but I will probably hook up some statistics monitoring system as well as the new hybrid inverter has a cool integration with the Home Assistant software.
I’ve been thinking of getting a hybrid inverter (rather than manually moving loads between grid power and inverter/solar power). How much did it set you back?
Slightly above 1000€ 😖 (made by FoxESS like the battery system)
Don’t take it as a general recommendation as I have yet to test it, but spec wise it seems to be a relatively good value for money.
I’m curious what type of Statistics monitoring system you aiming for @poVoq. I have ordered a 3.7kw panels + special type inverter for direct heating of a boiler and a secondary boiler/other item. And i am intrigued what the monthly differences are in kWh generation and would like to track those. Only I have no idea what I can hook up between the panels and inverter to log.
The hybrid inverter I got has a ethernet connection that can be connected to Home Assistant: https://github.com/nathanmarlor/foxess_modbus
Not sure yet how I will analyse that exactly, but it might be nice to automatically publish some stuff to a website via it.
I’m exporting from Home Assistant to Prometheus and visualize that using Grafana.
TIL electricity bills in London are a fuck ton cheaper than in the US even before the solar installation.
I doubt it’s the cost of electricity itself, but rather that the average European uses a lot less electricity (mainly due to more energy efficient appliances and no AC use).
Smaller houses probably help too
And houses with actual insulation and triple pane windows.
American houses are very well insulated for the most part. Triple pane windows are only marginally better than double.
Size is the biggest thing here.
The appliances are basically the same–no, American appliances don’t generally run on 120v–but I’ll bet average house size is the biggest thing.
Atm it’s about roughly 35-40 cents per kWh. That’s much higher than most places in the US which Google is telling me is 16 cents per kWh.
“Our solar power feeds into our local grid for our neighbours to use. We sell the electricity at market rates - which change every 30 minutes. This made us £13.”
Some more details on this would be interesting. We’re currently with Octopus and get just 15p/kWh when we sell back to the grid, but have to pay 25p/kWh when we buy from the grid.
What kind of rates (average?) are you getting, and who’s your supplier?
German here, 0.07€ to the grid, 0.37€ to buy back from the grid. You better believe I’m maximizing self usage with a big battery, two electric cars and a heat pump that can use the concrete floors as a buffer.
SDGE charges $0.50/kWh and gives you $0.05/kWh in return
Dam, we’re with octopus and we pay 30p/kWh for import.
We signed into a fixed term contract just before the process exploded. That contract ends in October though, so we’ll be paying 30p/kWh soon enough.
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I’ve been looking to get solar installed. Unfortunately not much for options around me. Prices are not viable.
