Solar panels , would you ?

[PJ87]

Slightly less savings this month however its because my usage has dropped for a few reasons (kids at nursery instead of home, newer more efficient fridge, more efficient washing machine, colder months less air con used by the wife)

billed usage £58.62
export £3.33
total usage 690.2kw (down from 820 month before)
without set up cost £227.19216
savings £171.90216

due to the rise in energy costs overall the savings for year 2 of system has surpassed savings of year 1 and the savings are just since may .

year one £1258 saving in full year
year two £1315 saving since may 23 and rising.

 

[Tashyboy]

Bro in law had his fitted on Friday. He is over the moon with them.
Me I paid my cheque in last week re My feed in Tariff. 65p a kw. It was 42.5 p when I had them first installed.
Seriously your money in the bank is making nothing.
Invest your money in you, solar panels and battery storage.

 

[cliveb]

Bro in law had his fitted on Friday. He is over the moon with them.
Me I paid my cheque in last week re My feed in Tariff. 65p a kw. It was 42.5 p when I had them first installed.
Seriously your money in the bank is making nothing.
Invest your money in you, solar panels and battery storage.

You are in the fortunate position of having a FIT contract at the highest rate. We had that in our previous house, and it was very lucrative. But those deals are in the past.

Money in the bank isn't making nothing these days. 5% is easy to get, and at that interest rate, solar panels don't actually yield a huge extra amount. I've just installed a 3.7kW system and estimate it will probably yield about £500 a year from reduction in electricity bills plus export payments. But if I'd kept the money in an ISA it would be earning £300 tax free anyway. So that's a net gain of around £200 a year. And the money is no longer a liquid asset - it's on the roof. It's absolutely not a slam dunk for everyone to invest in solar.

 

[larmen]

Well, they skipped the installation date today. For ‘weather reasons’ they didn’t fancy being in the roof today.

I think I give them a pass this time.
It didn’t rain as advertised, but it is a bit breezy.

 

[larmen]

We are now partly installed. 6 panels up on the main roof, once the scaffold comes down we add the last 2 to the conservatory roof.

Not generating much since install, wrong time of the year. But it gets the empty house load through the daylight hours. Never got the battery up by more than 20%, not doing any night time loads on intelligent tariffs.


One thing I am more wary about is consumption. The app is quite obvious when we pull what, unfortunately not what is pulling it. We get spikes of 3kWh, usually for a couple of minutes which I think might be the fridge, but today something took that for about an hour while we were out.

 

[Tashyboy]

We are now partly installed. 6 panels up on the main roof, once the scaffold comes down we add the last 2 to the conservatory roof.

Not generating much since install, wrong time of the year. But it gets the empty house load through the daylight hours. Never got the battery up by more than 20%, not doing any night time loads on intelligent tariffs.


One thing I am more wary about is consumption. The app is quite obvious when we pull what, unfortunately not what is pulling it. We get spikes of 3kWh, usually for a couple of minutes which I think might be the fridge, but today something took that for about an hour while we were out.

? Heating

 

[cliveb]

One thing I am more wary about is consumption. The app is quite obvious when we pull what, unfortunately not what is pulling it. We get spikes of 3kWh, usually for a couple of minutes which I think might be the fridge, but today something took that for about an hour while we were out.

It won't be the fridge - unless it's seriously faulty. Even a big fridge typically pulls no more than 400W.

3kW is kettle or oven territory.

 

[PJ87]

We are now partly installed. 6 panels up on the main roof, once the scaffold comes down we add the last 2 to the conservatory roof.

Not generating much since install, wrong time of the year. But it gets the empty house load through the daylight hours. Never got the battery up by more than 20%, not doing any night time loads on intelligent tariffs.


One thing I am more wary about is consumption. The app is quite obvious when we pull what, unfortunately not what is pulling it. We get spikes of 3kWh, usually for a couple of minutes which I think might be the fridge, but today something took that for about an hour while we were out.

How is your hot water heated

 

[larmen]

I think we heat the water with the boiler, but the tank also has immersion heaters. My understanding is that the immersion heater should do top up if necessary?

I changed the timing of the that immersion heater yesterday to 30 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes in the evening, basically cutting it down to half of what it was. I have no idea what the most practical settings are.

Heating itself runs off the gas boiler. We can heat it firing up and shutting down.

 

[full_throttle]

Oct 1 -Oct 31 £35.78 for electric, no idea of export as it's not shown on my bill.

 

[PJ87]

I think we heat the water with the boiler, but the tank also has immersion heaters. My understanding is that the immersion heater should do top up if necessary?

I changed the timing of the that immersion heater yesterday to 30 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes in the evening, basically cutting it down to half of what it was. I have no idea what the most practical settings are.

Heating itself runs off the gas boiler. We can heat it firing up and shutting down.

It is probably the water, I mean an immersion is basically a kettle which would explain the short spikes of that kind of power

 

[larmen]

I have a feeling that our boiler might not heat the water? https://idealheating.com/uploads/documents/logic-system-s-user-guide.pdf
There isn't a function about water temperature, just central heating in the manual.

I wonder if I should just get a CT clamp to confirm that.

On the other hand, I thought I set the immersion heater to limited times to support, and it seems to do it all around the clock instead. Going to have to look a little more into that.

 

[Fade and Die]

I have a feeling that our boiler might not heat the water? https://idealheating.com/uploads/documents/logic-system-s-user-guide.pdf
There isn't a function about water temperature, just central heating in the manual.

I wonder if I should just get a CT clamp to confirm that.

On the other hand, I thought I set the immersion heater to limited times to support, and it seems to do it all around the clock instead. Going to have to look a little more into that.

Your boiler is a system boiler not a combi so the water heating will be via valves that divert the hot water from the boiler to either the Central heating system of the immersion heater.

Does your programmer have a HW and a CH setting?

 

[cliveb]

If it's a system boiler, it will only have one temperature - usually set to around 65 degrees or thereabouts.
And the pump on a gas CH system won't be using 3kW.
So my guess is that it's an immersion heater. But in general if your HW is done by the gas boiler you don't use the immersion except in emergencies.
So turn the immersion off.

 

[PJ87]

If you can grid charge with your new battery .. then a time of us tariff would be a good way forward .. at the same time that it's cheap to charge the battery you can set the immersion to heat the water aswell

Win win

 

[larmen]

I have it on a Drayton Wiser system which also controls the radiator valves. The timings suggest it should not be firing at day time.

We have 2 of those automatic valves at the tank, Honeywell. On both valves either side pipes feel hot.

The consumption graph contains a cycle of washing machine as well today.

 

[larmen]

Joined the FB group for Drayton Weiser and they say the same. Switched if the immersion heater and so far I used 3.5 kWh less than the previous days. I be wonder how much money we paid so far over the last 5 years.

 

[PJ87]

Joined the FB group for Drayton Weiser and they say the same. Switched if the immersion heater and so far I used 3.5 kWh less than the previous days. I be wonder how much money we paid so far over the last 5 years.

Is that 3.5kw actually usage down or not the 3.5kwh spikes every now and again?

 

[larmen]

Proper kWh.
Usually in the last week when I started to look we already were at 5.5 to 6, this morning we were at 2.

The scale of the graph for the day is also much lower so far.

 

[cliveb]

Proper kWh.
Usually in the last week when I started to look we already were at 5.5 to 6, this morning we were at 2.

The scale of the graph for the day is also much lower so far.

And this is after you switched off the immersion heater, yes?
The question now is do you have enough hot water?

The reason I ask is that if you're heating the hot water with the gas boiler, and the immersion is switched on, the immersion should really only kick in if the hot water is below the tank's thermostat temperature. So if the immersion is being used a lot, there are three possible reasons:
1. The HW schedule for the gas boiler isn't long enough.
2. The tank thermostat temperature is set quite a bit higher than the boiler temperature.
3. The tank thermostat is faulty.