Christiano

We have a Samsung AE160RXYDEG, make sure the schedule for Legionnaire’s isn’t on heating method Economic as the immersion won’t come on and if you don’t get a high enough flow temperature you’ll never get it to 55 without the immersion. In the summer I don’t bother with Legionnaire’s as the iBoost keeps it in the 60s most of the time (except recently!).

To add to what’s been said above, we have 11kW of panels with SB5000TL (23 x 260W on 2 strings) and SB3600TL (17 x 250W on 2 strings). We can peak at up to about 9kW between the two and when it does it’s just capped off, no oscillating, no nasty noises. Been in since 2015, monitored by emonCMS since 2016.

I have a battery and Solar iBoost. Initially we had a nightmare of iBoost draining the battery but we got it sorted. The way to sort it was to extend the positive wire to the iBoost from the consumer unit and route it through the battery’s CT on the power in cable, with the direction of current flow in the iBoost cable in the opposite direction to the direction of the power in. Since doing that, it’s all worked really nicely, I can’t remember if I had to change the threshold on the iBoost, but I think it’s still at the default.

That’s interesting, thanks.

Our 16kW Samsung heat pump ramps up to about 5kW for some minutes to get it going after which it potentially drops down to about 2kW. It was oversized as we planned to add an extension with UFH, I regret that now and wish we had gone for the right size for the current needs.

Hi all, We have ~10kWp of Solar generation and an 8kW Powervault battery. We are thinking of adding 4kW to the Powervault which is £3k and at current Octopus Go rate (40p/7.5p) based on the last year I calculate that would pay back in 4.1 years although I suppose prices will probably go down within that time. The battery is in an outbuilding with a small east/west facing roof and I had thought about putting 2-3 panels facing west because our generation from the south-facing array drops off when the sun goes around. So I had this crazy thought that if I put a new system - panels/inverter/battery - it would all be at zero rated VAT so maybe, for not much more than the cost of upgrading the Powervault I could add both without affecting my FiT. I know I’d have to do something to control discharge so maybe only discharge from the second battery when the Powervault is empty. On the charge side maybe the new battery would only charge from the panels? Stupid idea?

Yes, we use emonCMS, I moved the emonPi to the ASHP controls and monitor via 2x CT plus 6x DS18B20. We also have 4x emonTH and 2x emonTx, one on the supply/solar and the other on the battery, so I have a pretty good idea what’s going on. I called Samsung about getting data out and they really weren’t helpful at all. That’s the most disappointing thing really; apart from using the Hive thermostat to make it go on/off, you have to go to the control unit and press horrible ‘buttons’ to get any info or change anything. I’m stunned that in this day and age with a company like Samsung that you can get such an expensive piece of kit with no app or even Wi-Fi.

I have a Newark Cylinder and I was looking at their site for info about my cylinder, saw they do buffers and I remembered this from earlier. When we ordered my cylinder it was very much a custom build so I would have thought if if they don’t do what you want off the shelf they would probably be more than happy to make it for you.

We have 2015 FIT, the generation goes via a meter into the consumer unit. We added a battery, have no idea of the MCS status of the installer, it has its own inverter and goes to a separate breaker, interfering in no way with the PV generation/metering. I am not concerned in even the tiniest bit that the battery may affect our FIT.

They said the fault was fixed but I couldn’t see the point in leaving it to their software when the 4-hour slot is so simple to do using the basic scheduler. It would be nice now we have a bit more sun to be able to automate something with home assistant. Hey it’s a shame they called the product the same as a popular range of Dell servers ‘cos it makes it much harder to google stuff.

Hi joth, I asked their support desk about APIs when it was installed in September last year, they said there was nothing that I could use. I could try & hack it from the app but it’s not really my skill-set. They also have something called smartSTOR which will “automatically set the best schedule for your PowerVault based on tariff prices and your household’s energy usage”. We set it to this initially but there was a software fault at at the time so have just done the overnight charge. I doubt it is clever enough to forecast our solar and only charge enough to get us to the right place. I have an emonTx in the outbuilding monitoring charge/discharge and the room temperature, it’s been as low as 3c in Nov/Dec and has been between 6c-13c since Feb. Not sure if the battery affects the temperature much? I expect it will in the summer, I may have to put some ventilation in if it gets hot (or leave the door open!).

We have an 8kWh Powervault in an outbuilding that already had a sub-consumer-unit. I had to put in 3 CAT5E cables, 2 from the consumer unit for Mains & Solar, one for internet. Was easy enough. Powervault is noisy, sounds like there are always some fans running. Glad the install surveyor advised to put it away from the house; I haven’t called their support yet to see if this is normal. The app is nice and you can just put the battery in normal mode and it will do exactly what you expect. We have Octopus Go so 4 hours @5p/kWh overnight, in the winter I had set the schedule to charge it up cheap every night but now I only need to charge to about 50%, this is a bit more manual (you can only set times in the schedule, you can’t say “charge to 50%”) and seems like slightly hard work to save 10-20p/day. Realistically I just check the weather forecast before bedtime and set the Powervault and heating to something appropriate.

I’m not an electrician and I managed to fill in the G99 application for UKPN. Took me about 30 minutes. Initially I was worried because the doc I received to fill in seemed lengthy but it boiled down to some questions on one side of A4 IIRC.

£1000 (to allow them to do it for 10 years) but they stopped the deal in around September last year. They haven’t done it yet, but we have been participating in Octopus’s 2-hour reduction trials.

3 fridges, 3 freezers (don’t ask!), fish tank and fish pond. The battery doing nothing is about 50W and the heat pump uses 150-230W.