Solar Panel Surface Area is More Important than Orientation? May data shows North Facing is great!
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- Опубликовано: 15 окт 2024
- Big thanks to Dorset Solar Solutions Ltd for an excellent installation. Definitely give them a call if you're in the Hampshire/Dorset area, let them know that you've seen my videos!
www.dorsetsola...
g.co/kgs/RJPVJw1
Here are the numbers for you to chew over!
You're welcome to make up your own mind and let me know in the comments!
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We have a SunSynk 8.8kW Inverter
Longi HiMo6 430W Panels
6 on the SE aspect
16 on the NW aspect
My videos are made with DJI gear.
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Fab result. It's nice when the gamble pays off regarding loading as many panels as viable/ possible. It's our first summer with our PV here up north in Leeds. The setup: 10kw solaredge, 15xSW/9xSE Panels. 24kwh battery. We managed 1148kwh total produced. 238kwh to home. 152kwh to battery. 758kwh to grid (£114 @ 15p/kwh). Battery to home 198kwh. Battery to grid 490kwh (£73 @ 15p/kwh). The economics for battery storage are tough depending on circumstances and how energy prices track long term. we definitely want a comfortable/ affordable winter (11kw heatpump!)... would we have built up enough credit to see us through the winter? If we had 1:1 net metering like they have in the states we probably wouldnt have got batterys to be fair. Another way to look at it is we're helping the grid during peak hrs and the grid is helping us off peak. Anyway lets see what June has to offer...maybe 1.4+ mwh? !!!
The Battery is actually a god send, mine charges at 2am until 4am with cheap electric, then I charge again from 1-4pm. It then covers cooking etc through the peak rate. it also disperses to the grid at 8:30am after everyone has gone to work/school so we get a small increase in exports set to grid first from 8:30-13:30. My system is small in comparison but once I figured out the battery strategy then it does work out better. Because of the sheer amount you can draw in off your system in panels might make it worth while not to have a battery but then you won't know for sure until you buy one to see if the benefits would be similar to mine. This is just an opinion from an owner of a small solar panel system(4kw.). I knew I was never going to be able to make myself completely self sufficient but I just wanted to take down my monthly bills and tbh its worked well so far.
An important point! If you physically can't get enough solar on your roof to cover 120% of your annual needs, then a battery may become necessary.
Fantastic result for what wasn’t a particularly sunny month!
Regarding batteries, I think their financial justification needs to consider your overall solar kWp and your export limit. I’ll be increasing my solar from 7.33 to 11.15kWp this year, but my export limit will still be 4kWh. Definitely a case of use (store) it or lose it! Also, with Fogstar now doing a 15kW battery for £2.5k the economics are probably easier to make work. I have 20kW of batteries and I wouldn’t be without them. We do have a high daytime load through the summer so they help with that, but psychologically, not using peak rate power ever helps me enormously
Don’t forget that a lot of people got batteries when prices were 30p peak and export was 4.1p , what doesn’t make sense today definitely made sense a couple of years ago!
That is an excellent summary! 👍
Ive had a north facing array for several years now & its consistently performed well at about 50%, like for like, compared to my south facing aspect. I have a complex roof line and just about to “go big” on my other, larger, north facing roof. My figures for may were 1480 kWh generated with 390 kWh exported, so hopefully I can increase on that somewhat. Keep up the good work 👍
Superb normal wafflage resumes 😂👍 great video
Very impressive for a N facing. I have roughly the same as you (20 x 450 panels) but all fully S facing (though 8 are partially to fully shaded before 10 and after 2*) I got 834 PV compared to your 1135. I wonder if weather also has something to do with it, it was a dismal May, maybe better where you are though I am also southern UK?
The main thing I hadnt considered is clipping to the 5kW inverter, on very sunny days i am getting clipping between 10-3 or my generation would be higher .. It looks like you arent getting that at all which helps. Also on non sunny days the N facing performs quite well due to scattered light I suspect? Currently my export is running at 85% of generation.
* you might ask why i got them, the reason is they are on a garage roof so minimal scaffolding and i essentially only paid for the panels, the install cost was covered by the 12 on my house roof.
Your solar generation for May is outstanding considering the Met Office monthly report for sunshine hours in the UK is stating May was only 82% of the norm (26th dullest on record).
Thanks for sharing. Glad your NORTH panels are working out, I have 6kW and they exceed my expectation. Regarding Tiago are you happy with their service? I am a premium member and their data has been so unreliable since last December and they still haven' migrated the data prior 14th Feb to the new server. Very disappointed with Tigo
The Tigo monitoring is not great, to say the least!
Great video full of facts.
Any idea what % of heating and hot water. Is hot water?I
I'm guessing 35% is not water over the year??
2024 to date.
1219kWh used for heating
346kWh used for hot water.
Hope I've understood what you're asking!
Great video. I moved to Intelligent Octopus Go last month with an EV charger install to access the 7.5p overnight import rate and 6 hours (instead of 14.9p and 3 hours on Flux). I do same with dishwasher etc pushing into lower rate overnight period. The impact of this change resulted in 50% reduction in import but same export so increasing profitability overall. I charge a 13.5kw battery full overnight then let the sun keep this topped up during the day exporting any excess, then from 5pm to 6.30pm fully discharge export the battery to take advantage of peak rate export. Have had this running for last month and my analytics suggest only December and January will be months that are not profitable.
Peak rate export on intelligent go?
@@Crazydiamond_1974 Still on flux export
@@turingtrading5301 Thank you, I’ll look into this
Excellent concise video and proof of concept.
If you are happy to give yourself an interest free loan, and not be bothered when you pay it off, then batteries make sense, but if your invested £ has to compete with other forms of investment, then maximise the solar, because you will seldom recover the investment over the life of the battery. The only case I can see is if you are prone to power outages, and then it's insurance, not savings
I'm waiting on DNO approval on 3.7kp South and 3.7 North on a 22 degree roof, (no battery) so I hope I get the same excellent results as you ! Thanks for sharing
I had my worst May since my panels were installed in December 2015, generated just 1035 this May, that's with 8.74 kWp of panels. So you did well. I still think you are missing a lot of tricks without a battery, especially when it's so easy to connect one to your inverter, and so cheap. Can't remember if your on Agile but prices are negative today, turn the solar off and get paid 9.5p kWh to use electric.
Same, but only had our system since Sept 22.
6k PV system. 691 generated. 427 export.
Lincolnshire. It's been like a nuclear winter overcast skies 😢
I’ve now had my 18-panel SE-facing 7.74 kWh system with 8.06 kWh battery up and running for almost 3 weeks (also installed by Martin of Dorset Solar Solutions). I am astonished by the figures and apart from trickle-in from the grid and charging my EV, we’ve been self-sufficient since the day of installation, with only a shall amount of gas used for cooking. Can’t wait to start exporting!
By the way, I’ve also set up detailed reporting through Home Assistant which is way better than the proprietary apps. Have you done this?
It's interesting that I have a 9.95 kWp system in Colorado and my best day in May was also 59 kWh. We get more sunny days so the month was 1420 kWh. We got a battery for backup power mostly.
The rationale for or against a battery depends on the export tariff. I have a 12 year old generation tariff with no metered export tariff. In this case I want to minimise PV export (as I don’t get paid for it).
Very good. I am thinking about installing some north facing panels,....just to clarify, per panel you said (4.30)49/60 (= 81%), you then later (6.40) said it was 68% on a per panel comparison. Are these different measurements?
Well spotted. Embarrassingly I rushed through this video and in that instance i've used the incorrect figure for the second slide. The earlier slides are definitely correct, albeit with some rounding.
Here's the full picture.
SE Array - 357.98kWh /6 panels = 59.663kWh per panel.
NW Array - 777.22kWh / 16 panels = 48.576kWh per panel.
Indeed, I should have been using 81% as the figure, instead of the 68% figure that I had copied in from the wrong part of my spreadsheet.
68% is the total generation of the NW aspect, but not relevant in the per panel or north vs south comparison.
@@UpsideDownFork No worries, thanks for the clarification.
I've got the same style house as you. My roofs face east at the back which is the largest area and west at the front where we might be able to fit 6 panels like you have. Do you think it would be worth it??? I have two vent tiles on the back roof. I live in the north west of England.
Definitely worth it. E/W split roof is the most effective for solar. You may not generate quite as much as a south facing roof, but you will generate it at more usable times of the day.
Our SE roof catches the sun quite early and gives us power throughout the morning and our NW roof gives us power late in the day so we can often cook dinner just from solar power.
You will do better than I am!
Have you got G99 DNO approval or a 3-phase connection? My understanding is that G98 is limited to 16A per phase which is a mere 3.68kW on a typical domestic single phase supply. My 16x435W due south facing panels overperformed only during their first year, now they're producing under 90% of the predicted amount and hardly ever export 3.6 kW in an hour. Even on the longest sunniest days, there aren't enough sunny daylight hours in the day to export 60 kWh in a day! The most I've ever exported in just 1 day (of the 1230 days I've had my installation) was 30.1 kWh and it achieved 3.6 kW only on the noon hour. To get your 59.1 kWh I would need 32 due south facing panels. My mind is blown, my panels would seem to be rubbish!
I'm now tempted to add north facing panels on the basis of your positive experience but needing planning permission for the upgrade and potentially needing G99 approval and an export rate limiter make me question whether it would be a good investment. It has answered a question for me though. My inverter has a "self use>grid>battery" priority mode which I couldn't see a usage case for. Now I realise that it would apply when you have an export rate limiter and need to store your excess generation. Such a situation would justify expanding my battery capacity to be able to deliver 16A export throughout the 4-7pm peak pricing period, if the alternative would be throttling back generation earlier in the day or else dumping power into the immersion heater! The profit would not be the peak rate premium, it would be the full value of the electricity which could otherwise not be exported.
We applied for G99 but got rejected and had to reapply with G100 to limit export to 6.5kW. No 3 phase.
So far we haven't seen much clipping but we are leaving a small amount on the table.
In the most ideal conditions we could export more than 6.5kW or as you say, connect a battery to soak up that excess 👍
Our roof space is really large but it is true north facing, so I guess you're benefiting from the west orientation? Our South roof has a huge dormer on it
There is certainly some afternoon benefit to the west but the biggest advantage of our larger array is when the sun is obscured.
That's when the clouds diffuse the light and it barely matters at all which direction the array points.
Right now for example we are generating 1290W NW vs 560W SE. I would have expected the SE to be dominating the morning production, which it only does when it's a completely clear sky i.e. not very often in the UK 😉
@@UpsideDownForkSame experience here. The NE facing panels sometimes work even better than the SW facing panels in cloudy weather. The difference might be in the Enphase IQ8 micro inverters.
The SW roof has some shading issues in which the Tigo optimisers were absoluty useless. Bought some Chinese optimizers instead and that really improved the performance (GNE Honeybee).
Tigo customer support is really terrible if you do not have their elaborate monitoring system installed . No way to help even when my inverter was clearly showing them the total lack of result in partial shade on the "optimized" string.
I have a battery and am on Octopus Intelligent. I charge my battery at 7p and run off that all day, any solar is sold at 15p. For me the battery makes the solar expensive (as the battery 1/4’s my electricity bill). The only reason I had solar is because it reduced the vat on my battery. 😂 After seeing your videos I am now tempted to instal solar on my North roof as I have a spare input on my inverter.
Two things that are often neglected by those with battery systems.
1. Conversion losses.
2. Standby losses.
Once you factor those in, your import rate will be much higher than 7.5p 👍
Then once you account for capital investment and embodied carbon, the case for a battery seems tentative for lots of scenarios.
Just hoping to point out that each should carefully do their own sums. 👍
@@UpsideDownFork yes, I get that, my round trip efficiency (so electric in vs out) is 90% so ok my home electric is 7.7p is still good. My battery also offers backup power and manages the best use of my solar (so in the winter months it will put more (or all) of the solar in to the battery for use by my heat pump to save me from exporting at 15p then having to buy back later at 26p if my battery runs out).
If you’re taking advantage of the backup power ability did you split your distribution board or does one just manage which circuits / appliances to use?
@@stevenm45 i have a Tesla Powerwall, it has a gateway. From my understanding you move heavy demand items (EV charger for example) away from the back up or it would just drain your battery. The thing I like is that my solar keeps going during a power cut. I don’t have many power cuts where I live but I’ve had a few over the last year and the lights don’t even flicker when it switches over, the only way you’d know is the message on your phone from the Tesla app.
@@UpsideDownFork If I charge my battery from solar, then it's all DC, I think you are a little confused that batteries have standby losses. Yes an AC connected battery would because it has an inverter, But a DC connected battery has negligible standby losses, really just the power BMS uses. If I charge from the grid, then yes there would be conversion losses. Yours would be a DC connected battery.
What are you using for data collection . Is it open source energy or is it a package that comes with theTigo ?
Tigo Cloud Connect Advanced.
Thanks
I have a battery, and I'm on Agile too, so I'll be getting slightly lower rates because I'm not paying the peak rate. The benefits are marginal. In my view it's only worth investing in a battery if there isn't a better option for that money.
I have noticed that many of the people talking up batteries, or saying how much savings that they're getting, are ignoring the lifetime cost per kWh of the battery in their calculations.
Just worked out my own costs: I paid £15.23 for 112.55 kWh in May, so 13.5p per kWh. So I "saved" 1.4p vs your 14.9p using a battery.
I live in London so similar insolation to you. We are also a family of 5 and we use Agile too.
Let's say my Tesla Powerwall costs £6000 (including installation), has 10kWh usable charge, the warranty is 10 years and is fully charged/discharged once a day. That gives me a battery usage charge of 16p per kWh. It'll probably last 20 years, so it'll be 8p per kWh.
It is the summer, and perhaps I'll get more than one charge/discharge per day in winter. We'll see. Not looking like a great investment so far.
EDIT: of course, if I compare it to the price cap, or the flexible tariff (about 25p per kWh) it does look good.
Nice figures that illustrate an important point.
Also consider standby losses, although I appreciate those are hard to measure on most systems.
You will definitely be winning by a much greater margin in the winter!
My unit rate for winter was 18p.
@@UpsideDownFork From a carbon intensity point of view, the battery does help.
I charge it in the cheapest (generally lowest carbon) part of the day and I don't use the grid during peak (normally the peak carbon bit too). That will also be better over winter too.
I don't feel so bad now. I have burnished my green credentials slightly.
1135kwh thats good , i just had a look at may and with my 32 panels facing E S & W i only got 669kwh . i dont know why im so low im not far from you .59kwh in a day , i can never get more than just under 40
Good question. 32 panels? What is their rating? Which inverter do you have? Do you have shading issues?
@@UpsideDownFork i did a reply and its disappeared
We have 17 panels, 13 south facing, 4 west, all 420w totalling 7.14kW and a 6kW inverter all on one string, but all with optimizers. May gave us 893 kWh of generation.
These figures are roughly in line with UpsideDown's figures. Yours really look a bit low.
Are you suffering from some shading? Without optimisers one panel being shaded would have a big impact on that string's output.
If this isn't the case it looks like there may be something not quite right on your system.
@@Ben-gm9lo ill have to see what they estimated when i has them fitted . ive no shading at all they get good sun from 6am to nearly 9pm this time of yr .
@@UpsideDownFork Sorry ive got 23 panels i dont know where i got that number from . i had 14 rent a roof panels they let me buy for £4,000 then i had Infinity from Southampton add 9
2.835 kWp - QCELLS 315 W
PV Modules 9 x Q.PEAK DUO BLK-G5 315 Rev5
(v2)
Manufacturer Hanwha Q.CELLS
Inclination 33 °
Orientation Southeast 122 °
Installation Type Mounted - Roof
PV Generator Surface 15.2 m²
Inverter 1
Model Solis-mini-3000-4G (v1)
Manufacturer Ginlong (Solis
If and when the grid goes down you will say dang I should have got some batteries. Look at the money you are making with extra export. Put that aside for batteries.
Good point! 👍
We're fortunate to live in an area that has not had a power cut that I've noticed in the last 14 years of being here. But who knows what the future may bring?
What I do know is that battery prices are tumbling at quite a rate! 😉
@@UpsideDownFork Yes even if you just get 1 now then another in 6 months and keep doing that until you have enough to run a full day with no sun maybe 3 days like I have. We live in a crazy world where there are no guarantees. Having power to heat house and keep fridge/freezers running is huge. Plan for the worse.
I think the part of the over generation compared to estimates is due to the higher hours of sunlight in Southampton compared to the rest of the uk. Southampton (1705) is more than Paris (1662) and is closer to Milan (1915) in terms of hours of sunshine per year than Manchester (1265). I imagine most estimates would be based on uk average amount of sunshine. I think most people underestimate the variation within the uk.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Europe_by_sunshine_duration
You raise a good point about the difference across the UK, but that's not the case with the forecasts. They are all generated using the exact location.
That is the case for PVGIS, OpenSolar or EasyPV.
You can have a little play here:
re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/