All, hoping for a bit of guidance on how best to make the most of my solar
My System Spec is:
5kWh Hybrid inverter
9.5kW Battery
7.2kWp Solar
During my Solar install we were able to fit an extra couple of panels on the roof so my Solar peak went up to a little ove 7kWp, compared to the 6kWp we orginally expected. As i have a mix of a SE aspect and SW aspect i thought this would be ok with some of the panels ramping down as the others were ramping up, but i’ve already seen multiple days well above 7kW .
The hybrid inverter obviously has the the ability to handle this but when the battery is full uit can only export a max of 5kW and its just dumping the excess as heat. I can offset this by dumping a little of the battery capacity before hand to make sure there’s some space, however once it reaches the lower limit it stops supporting the house, but this means that on cloudy days i’m just discharging the battery for no reason or drawing off the grid when the battery has the capacity and then charging it again later.
Is there any way to have the battery stay at around 80%, export everything else and then only charge the battery when there is a solar level above 5kW and then discharge back to 80%, whilst continuing to support the house?
You can set a timed export down to 80% say between 10:00 and 15:00.
This way if solar gen is lower the 5kWh then the battery will discharge bringing export up to 5kWh.
If solar gen is over 5kWh then the battery will take the excess as charge if space.
If the sun goes away for an extended period, the battery will stop exporting when it gets down to 80%.
It’s a good way to extend the max export, reduce clipping losses and fill in any lower than 5kWh dips.
Thanks, this is what I’m currently doing and it does stop the clipping as you describe, but when the discharge gets down to 80% it pauses all of the discharge, including supporting the house
It’s generally not that big of an issue, as most of the time when this happens there’s not a massive amount of usage in the house, but I have drawn off the grid a few times
Is there anyway to get it to keep supporting the house after the effort hit target?
I’ve just (this morning) configured a few Home Assistant automations to achieve this, similar setup to yours other than 2 9.5"s;
Automation 1
Set the inverter to export for 3 hours at 5:30am
As I’m just testing this I’ve just set the maximum export period for now but I need to scale this with the estimated excess solar available, which needs to be calculated, probably as a function of the estimated solar generation with one of the available solar integrations in HA.
Automation 2
I check, every 30s, if the solar generation is over 4900w and if the inverter power (this is export + home) is over 4800w then increment the battery charge level by 100w
Automation 3
I check, every 30s, if the inverter power is under 4800w then decrememt the battery charge level by 100w
This allows the the battery to soak up excess solar above the 5Kw export limit by increasing and decreasing the battery charge periodically to match the excess. I’ve just estimated the switching levels, theres probably a better way to calculate it.
I also, at 7pm reset the battery charge level to 3600w (max) ready for the night time Intellegent Octopus charge.
Below is today’s graph, I only had it running fully in the afternoon but you can see the solar exceeding the normal 5kw I’ve been clipping to.
