Energy Matters:Home Solar

[mickthemaverick]

No I am watching on TV, better view!!

[Rp0thejester]

Damn!! Hold the Mick jokes till next week guys!

[mickthemaverick]

Just make sure it's secure enough not to end up in the next street in a gale.

Thanks Gibbo, taking that point on board I had a rethink and came up with the idea of splitting the panel frames about a central axis so they could each be stowed flat if the wind speed gets above a pre-determined level. Again a couple of pictures illustrate my initial thinking:

Own work The arrangement

Own work The lifting concept

[NewcastleFalcon]

Keep the info coming on Solar, plenty to be found out. Ideally you would want a storage facility to avoid the crumbs given for your daytime generation from the usual suspects, and to support your own home requirements at the time of your choosing. You dont want the energy companies buying it at 6p/kWh and selling it back to you in the evening at 50p/kWh or more

Having a 24kWh battery in the car, the day needs to arrive when there is no need to fork out for an overpriced "home storage" battery of comparatively low capacity, and make use of the comparatively high capacity battery in the vehicle. Connect up and use at your convenience. Maybe at the lowest scale of ambition, charging your car battery up from the solar panels is the most achievable, and some will already be doing this. Have to dig around and see if examples can be found to add to the thread.

I have been looking a bit at the size/output of panels. They tend to be around 1.7m x 1.1m for a panel of around 400W. and an array of at least 10 panels and preferably 12 would be necessary for a 4kW to 4.8 kW system.

https://www.deegesolar.co.uk/wp-content ... _Panel.pdf

Cost for the panels alone about £4,000 to £5,000.

With quite an awkward roof albeit facing SSE , with two velux, each 1mx1m, and a dormer, the roof surface is rapidly consumed, and in its current form would struggle to fit the requisite number of panels. An additional less productive side roof facing ENE could be used but way from ideal.

The roof slope is about 45° on the folded square of paper held against the internal slope.

https://www.eco-home-essentials.co.uk/s ... ation.html

Regards Neil

[Peter.N.]

There are quite a lot of ex standby batteries for telephone exchanges etc available on ebay. My experience with them so far had been good. They are a fraction of the price of new ones and you can test them with a car type battery condition indicator which puts a load of 100a on them. You can get 170 ah ones for about £130. Their capacity when new would have been nearly 2 kwh, could be well over 1kw used. I should have mentioned they are 12 volts.

A 24v series parallel system with 8 of them should give you around 6 kwh of storage. New the are about £550.

Peter

[mickthemaverick]

Any comments on a couple of these for my storage?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265807524692 ... OSwKpVi56G~

[NewcastleFalcon]

Any comments on a couple of these for my storage?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265807524692 ... OSwKpVi56G~

Nothing first hand from me Mick, I am very much at the interested to find out stage, so I would be quite happy for you to do your thinking out loud on the thread, helps me to learn more .

While I can see a DIY project has its appeal, sooner or later you run into Building Regs, and Certification of Electrical Installations. Qualified electricians, registered with a trade scheme, can self-certify and provide the necessary certificates which will be required by a Solicitor in any future conveyance of a property should you come to sell it. You may consider yourself to be totally competent in DIY for the project, but your work will be required to have the certificates of compliance with building regulations and not just under the electrical installations bit.

For all of the grant getting DIY is never really an option, registered and certified installers usually a pre-requisite.

Some of the grants for Home Solar have been generous in the past, just last year I made an application to the Green Homes Grant scheme, which was I believe up to £10,000 grant...not loan...run through E-on, had a surveyor appointment but withdrew our application, due to my own assessment of the roof not being suitable for a decent sized array, and some concerns about any strings attached to any long-term agreement with E-on, and possible complications for a sale of the House should the need arise.

As a bit of a comparison, here's some prices from an outfit who regard themselves as UK's Leading Solar Panel Installers. Bottom of the Page.

https://www.deegesolar.co.uk/solar_pv/

https://www.deegesolar.co.uk/solar_pv/# ... V%20SYSTEM


Regards Neil

[mickthemaverick]

Thanks for those thoughts Neil, I have the electrical side fully covered with Bob's son Paul (Elstree connection) being a fully qualified and certified electrical installer who will actually do the installation in liason with one of my ex sub-contractors, Dion, who is a fully fledged roofing engineer. Together with my mate Dave, fabrication and mechanics, the four of us cover all the aspects. Another former colleague, Pete, was the borough surveyor for Watford Borough Council so he will handle the planning side for me. All in all a highly competent and professional group who just use me as the problem solver and designer (same thing really ).
There will be much beer consumption during the initial planning stages when I will need to talk them into this "exciting new adventure" no doubt Pretty much how it always works whichever of us has a project to tackle!

[mickthemaverick]

Another potential piece of kit for my system, I may consider two inverters like this to power my two seperate consumer units, garage and house - still at the ideas stage.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/112496420845 ... SwoQ1TmxVg

fed by an array of this type:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/233627677124

via a controller to bridge panel/battery/inverter like this sort of thing:

BFTW

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144570603491 ... SwE71ijftc

[Gibbo2286]

Agree with all the legislation pitfalls Neil I too looked at the DIY option but decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

My panels installed Feb 2018 at a cost of £4,465.55 by Forever green Energy Cheltenham came with a plethora of documentation.

The company is located near to the AMS Auctions site Mick.

[myglaren]

Have you considered hot water storage for excess electrical production?
A couple of cubic metres of boiling water in the attic could be useful.

I was talking of this to my second daughter yesterday and they haven't looked in to it but she has a friend in her village with a seven bedroom, four bathroom, several sitting rooms, dining room etc. who is very energy conscious and has a solar array on the roof and one in their garden (huge) and everywhere maximum insulation, heat pumps and batteries, they drive Teslas, of course.
Her electric bill is £200 a year. Standing charge I expect.

[NewcastleFalcon]

fed by an array of this type:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/233627677124

£800 each? or is that 800 for each set of 3 perhaps Look a bit pricy compared to this LG Offer if its £800 each

https://solarsuppliesuk.co.uk/product/l ... pv-panels/

Regards Neil

[mickthemaverick]

Have you considered hot water storage for excess electrical production?

No I havn't got as far as dealing with surplus Steve, but thanks, that is one idea for the think tank (no pun intended!). I am, in my engineering bent way, quite keen on the gravitational storage methods. From using a winch powered by surplus to raise a heavy weight via a clockwork type regulator so that when more power needed it can drop and turn a generator, to pumping water into a loft tank and then draining it through a turbine when extra power needed. Those both tend to be peak surge type backups whereas thermal storage obviously has greater longevity. Those ideas are definitely to come along in due course!!

[mickthemaverick]

fed by an array of this type:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/233627677124

£800 each? or is that 800 for each set of 3 perhaps Look a bit pricy compared to this LG Offer if its £800 each

https://solarsuppliesuk.co.uk/product/l ... pv-panels/

Regards Neil

Its £800 for the item which consists of 3 panels so £266 each

[mickthemaverick]

Having just had a good read of the deegesolar site as per Neil's post the pricing seems very competitive. I would be looking at their 5.6Kwh Sofar system I think comparing costs to mine and I'm only going to save maybe £3k tops by doing it myself. I have to agree with Gibbo that £3k is not really sufficient to make up for all the extra grief of doing it myself Hmmm