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.

Before we got the battery I did some analysis and we typically used 8-12kWh outside solar generation hours without the heat pump. We have a pretty high base load, about 500W before battery and heat pump.

Thanks! Following someone else’s comment I had been wondering whether that was the case, but we got the PowerVault battery via EDF with “Grid Services” which reduced the price in return for permitting them to release some charge to balance the grid. My emonPi tells me that it does export up to about 200w when it’s discharging. I wonder if it’s tuneable at their end. The plan is to get more evidence then call PowerVault about both things, I can do another G99 application if it’s not a complete waste of time.

We live in Kent and have 11kW of panels (8.6kW of inverters). On our best days we can generate >60kWh in summer and we generated 45kWh on a perfect day a couple of weeks ago. There are always days in the winter though when we only generate 1.5 and rare days when we don’t even make 1. These often come together so we would need at least double our normal daily usage in battery storage and thinking about it there wouldn’t have been enough in the days leading up to a 2-very-grey-day period to fully charge those batteries. So I would say “no” to your question unless you can provide a significant proportion of your annual consumption for battery storage or maybe if you go to sunnier climes for our winter (wouldn’t that be nice!). Our normal daily usage prior to ASHP was about 24kWh, I think our highest with ASHP was a cold day in late November and we used about 70kWh. Like another poster above, we generate roughly what we use (9mW/year before ASHP) but could only use half of it. It will probably change quite a bit now we have 8kWh battery and ASHP.

Yes, but the UKPN contact didn’t respond to me asking for clarification on that point and we decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. If we add battery capacity we will probably add the export limiting device and try for G99 again.

I was very disappointed by UKPN, we already have an older G98(?) approval to export up to 8.6kw from our Solar and on asking for G99 to increase the battery inverter from 3.68 to 5.5 they said yes so long as “export is limited to zero by an export limiting device”.

We have a Newark cylinder which was put in by our Solar guys so we could do PV diversion but at the time it was on 2x LPG boilers. It’s now on the ASHP with no changes except the incoming pipe work. Nice bit of future-proofing!

We were going to go with Joule/Samsung but changed to a different installer who gave us the same Samsung 16kW Heat Pump as offered by Joule. It’s working well, my main problem with it is the lack of remote-controlness. I think the Joule system came with an app but not via the alternative supplier. If you expect to be able to get lots of data from it or control it remotely, have a really close look at what you are getting. Back to the unit though, Samsung give a 7-year warranty (in the UK, subject to having it serviced, check it’s the same for you) and it’s been fine for us since installation in September last year.

When we had gas boilers I put a Hive TRV on each radiator, it was a nightmare especially when allowing individual radiators to call for heat. I took them all off. We changed to a heat pump last year (Samsung), the thermostat is in the main living room. It struggles a bit to get this up to temperature unless we’re in the room so I put TRVs back in the bedrooms to cap the heat at comfy bedroom temperatures. This worked fine except for when we had family staying at Christmas when we were all in the living room with the door shut so the heating hardly ran at all, the rest of the house got quite chilly. Luckily our thermostat is wireless and I moved it into one of the bedrooms on the second evening. Since then I have reduced the weather compensation so it has been running around 38c for heating, seems to work nicely, electricity usage seems better and CoP is too although that may be because it’s not been so cold outside. I may remove weather compensation completely in favour of a fixed 38c.

True, and our battery is a PowerVault who sell normal batteries and and Eco option that uses Nissan Leaf batteries which are no longer good enough for the car but okay for home use.

I don’t think it’s feasible to be off-grid for a normal home, especially with heat pump and EV. Unless you can get a lot of batteries. We have 11kWp solar in Kent and on a grey day in the winter we can get less than 1kWh. We typically generate 9mWh a year, export about half of it even with diversion to immersion. If you put too much solar in you may not be able to use it all (unless you divert to EV) so I wouldn’t go too large unless it gets cheaper the bigger you go. I do like some of the thinking in the EV space about the car powering the home in the evening then charging in the wee small hours on cheap electric.