Dillsue

Nice one. Personally, Id always want a choice of heat inputs so not wholly reliant on a single source. In the OPs position keep the boiler as primary source for now but have a separate coil for a future HP. When the HP goes in keep the boiler as a back up....who knows where hydrogen development is going in the future

Speak to Newark Copper cylinders, tell them what you want to achieve and let them design the cylinder. Id specify a coil each for the boiler, ashp and solar thermal to keep your options open. Also have 2 immersion bosses so you can have flexibility over where heat directly. Get extra insulation. May cost few £100 more but youve got flexibility in the future....who knows where fuel/energy cost and technology are going

At 9kw its quite a substantial system needing a G99 application. Our DNO charges £250+vat just to look at an application. Installers have got their admin and drawing to add to that. If 24 x panels are split over 2 pitches then scaffolding cost could be a fair bit. Assuming youve got a material schedule to go with the quote youll easily be able to work out material cost from online sellers. Our DNO told me a couple of weeks ago that they had received loads of G99 applications recently suggesting the trade is busy. If thats the case its likely a sellers market and you could be paying a premium just now. May be worth waiting til the autumn/winter when everyones forgotten about solar??

+1. I dont think many people appreciate the embodied energy/emissions wasted and caused by smashing something up and then buying something to replace it. On top of emissions is the environmental damage attributed to disposal and sourcing new raw materials.

Thats not my very recent experience with SPEN. We want to double our PV output from 16 to 32amp and need G99 approval. Emailed SPEN, someone phoned me back the next day, a couple of phone calls/emails later and we have an in principle agreement. Our transformer is under sized by modern standards so SPEN are changing that FOC. Weve a design verification fee to pay but seemingly nothing other than that. What came out in conversation was that they are currently getting lots of applications from trade installers who are submitting s***e, so they get rejected. You cant blame the DNOs for installers cutting and pasting the wrong info.

The timing was to get PV installed before the price cap got raised so there'd be no unfitted equipment lying around. The intent was for self install where people could or with supported install using roofer/spark. No PV installers as they all seem busy.

Having had the power off for 3 days over xmas in the 90s we've not been without a generator since. If youre on overhead line grid supply I think youd be nuts not to have a small back up generator. Predictions are storm intensity is likely to get worse and youve only got to look at what happened in the north of england/scotland a few weeks ago to realise that it takes time to repair storm damage leaving some people without power for weeks. With most storms happening in the winter when the suns not shinning theres a fair chance batteries may not be fully charged and very unlikely to keep the lights on for more than a day or two if the power goes off. £200 for a small genny seems a no brainer to me if youre on a vulnerable supply.

I dont know if it will???? A few months back I started a WhatsApp group of about 15-20 contacts who I knew could fund a PV install with a view to bulk buying as a group and hopefully enjoy some sizeable discounts. 1 person had already installed solar and no one else was interested!

If you want cheap/secondhand panels then ebay. If youre not bothered about matching panels then just buy as they come up at the right price/near by. Bare in mind that if youve got electrically mismatched panels, the lowest output panel will bring the output of the whole array down, unless wired in what could be complicated wiring if youve got a few variants of panel. Micro inverters or optimisers get round panel mismatch so a good solution if your collecting panels as you go.

If this install is on a garage roof and theres access to the underside of the roof mount micro inverters or optimisers in the garage roof where they are accessible anytime. Get the roofer to notch the tiles and feed the cables through a slit in the felt next to a rafter

MCS is only required if you want to get paid for export. With 2.4kwp and batteries youll likely only ever export significantly when youre on holiday but certainly not enough to warrant the premium an MCS installer charges

The G98 is a notification, not an application. You tell them after the event what youve done, if atall. Our DNO has no record of our FIT system installed by an MCS installer in 2015! Use a part P spark to test and certify the AC connection although I think the DNO is mainly interested that the inverter is G98 compliant with 16amp limitation. If your garage roof is rickety then by all means get a structural engineer and building control involved, but your roofer/joiner will be able to give you a practical veiw on the structural state of the roof. With SE/BC youll bury yourself in red tape and cost. In the previous thread you said you were more than capable of doing all the work except the roof work, which is why I suggested to use a roofer to fit the mounts and drop the panels onto the mounting rails. Panels plug together with MC4 connectors and I sure thats within the capabilities of a roofer or yourself off single storey scaffold. PV install is straight forward and easily DIYable with the only proffessional help being a part time spark. Go for it before everyones at it and prices start to climb.

Any supplier that makes that sort of ultimatum to a customer whos not getting what they want should get the leave it option by default. Find yourself a roofer, show him the Renusol install video on Youtube, and let him fit panels and you do the wiring.

In the section referencing CTs, the doc says "Typically, all interface functions are contained within an Inverter and in such cases it is only necessary to have the Inverter Fully Type Tested". I read that as if youre using a G98 inverter any CT or CT function providing interface protection is integral to the inverter. There may be a need for a CT to manage battery charging but thats on the DC side and not part of the export limitation that the DNO is interested in. Id speak to the inverter manufacturer and clarify things with them.

That doesnt sound right to me. AFAIK if the PV and battery sit on the DC side of the inverter and you use a G98 compliant inverter then the DNO isnt interested in how anything else works ie how your CT connects to the inverter/battery charger. The DNO may insist on a wired CT(or anything else) if its being used for G100 export limitation but with a DC coupled G98 inverter an export limitation system shouldnt be needed

Spoke to our DNO today about adding to our PV and he said theyve seen a big increase in PV related enquiries. In your position Id work out what youre likely to export and see if its worth doing an MCS install.... with 2.4kwp I suspect not. If you bin the MCS installer you can do the install yourself and use any part P spark to connect up the AC for you all totally legit. Assuming its a single story garage the roof work is low risk and fairly straight forward. Buy a second hand alloy tower scaffold and sell it when your done. With your own scaffold theres no rush to do the install and get rented scaffold off hire

The export meter is the house meter that belongs to the DNO. If its smart it measures electric coming into the house(import) that you pay for and measures electric leaving the house(export) that you could get paid for under SEG. This meter is nothing to do with your PV or MCS installer.

A few observations... If youve got 2.4kwp and make even the smallest effort to self consume, youre not likely to be exporting much so is it worth paying the premium for an MCS install? Youll be paying a premium and maybe constrained in how you configure things Not sure what inverter youre using but ours gives a readout of generation by day, week and total since install so you may not need a generation meter if the inverter gives that info. I cant see what the issue is with connecting into the garage CU. Weve got several consumer units all fed from the same incoming service fuse/meter and our MCS installers were quite happy to feed into one which wasnt nearest the incoming supply. They just fitted the dual supply warning labels to the other CUs

In the installers email to you with the projected generation figures, he says you can compare the projected figures to those on the solar generation meter. That suggests youve got a generation meter?? That meter is exactly what you need to be looking at to see how your system is performing!

If the smart meter you are talking about is the main household meter, then no its not the generation meter. The household meter records the electricity coming in and out of the house. Theres a figure of 2.5kwh that you are getting from your Eddi. If that figure is actually KWH rather than KW its not a snap shot of what the panels are generating at the time you look at the Eddi. The intantaneous generation figures will be in W or KW like the figure of 1617W shown on your inverter display. 1617W(1.617KW) is the actual generation at that moment in time(10 17?) whereas the 2.5KWH is the quantity of electricity generated over a period of time. Is the 2.5 figure KWH or KW? I dont know your inverter but the solaredge inverters we have have a cumulative total generation figure in them so you can read the total generation from since installation dirdct from the inverter. It may be worth having a look to see if you can get that figure from your inverter. That figure will be much more representative of how your system is performing than looking at random snapshot figures.

The OP says he collected all the serial numbers so adding the necessary gateway and setting up web monitoring should be doable, but... If theres a generation meter its easy enough to see if the annual generation aligns with the 4700kwh forecast provided by the installer. Depending on orientation the installers forecast aligns with PVGIS forecast for Bristol. @Dan. Is there a generation meter and have you got the last few years figures??

The sun is low where your tree is to the south east of an array in the winter when generation is at its lowest so shading will have little impact. In late spring, summer and early autumn the sun is fairly high to the south east of an array when generation is at its highest so shading has a greater impact. Without details its impossible to know how shading may affect your generation but its unlikely to be insignificant if your installer has raised it as an issue and advised to fit optimisers. We have 75% of our PV facing SE and a tree opposite that array would undoubtedly cut our production If youre drawing a blank with local experts willing to check out your system, seems that online forum support would be a great second choice to shed some light on your issue(s).

I think the TAP and CCA are required to get full functionality of monitoring and shutdown. If the TAP and CCA were required for optimisation, the OP wouldnt have any generation atall??

Ive no hands on experience with Tigo optimisers, but AFAIK you dont need a gateway/TAP for them to optimise panel generation?? Happy to be corrected but I thought the gateway/TAP/CCA were all to allow remote monitoring and some other enhanced functions, other than power generation?? Remote monitoring would be an absolute god send for the OP!!

Just realised that you said in your first post that the panels were "shade free" yet the installer makes allowance for shading and specifically refers to a tree shading the array????????