Image is a graph from the electric company showing my usage for a day this week. From 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM we used absolutely no utility power.
I’m almost at the three week mark for having this system up and running. The first two weeks I only had 3 KW of PV input but I added another 5 panels to bring it up to 4 KW last week. It’s also still running from a transfer switch in “off grid” mode because I don’t yet have the prep work done to move my breaker box and start moving circuits to it. (That means I’m either on full solar+battery or utility, no mixing or load sharing).
Once I get it wired in fully, I’m probably going to switch to time-of-use billing. Unfortunately, I can’t do that ahead of time because rather than just making off-peak use cheaper, it makes peak usage (M-F 7am to 9pm) extremely expensive while off peak dirt cheap. I wish there was a middle option, but it is what it is.
I’m also being very conservative with my battery usage since I want to have at least 50% in “reserve” to cover power outages. That’s especially important during these heat waves. We could easily run 24/7 but would have to take a day off every so often to just let it charge back up since my system is a bit too small to cover all our usage indefinitely (at least if we want to run the A/C for comfort, that is).
Thanks very much for the detailed info. It seems Europe is much more friendly about providing info to the customer. The US allows our power cos to keep a lot of the data under wraps. Solarman looks like a great set of products but is sadly eu-centric.
I’m in the US, lol, just not in a very solar-friendly area. The power company data I have access to is a side effect of both their green washing and constantly rising rates. It’s supposed to help you manage your bill more than anything else.
The batteries and inverter I’m using are Eco-Worthy which is Chinese and available globally. The inverter itself is a re-badged SRNE and has proven to be reliable and well built. Not sure if they’ve passed EU certification, but they’re UL9540 and UL1973 certified in the US
The HomeAssistant module was made for Solarman products but is compatible with others such as the inverter I have (which is itself a re-badged SRNE one).