On order...

GivEnergy AC 3.0 Inverter

We just placed an order (through Cawoods who are local to us[1]) for a GivEnergy 9.5KWh solar battery and 3KW inverter - demand is high at present, so it may not be fitted for a while, but....

Essentially it gives us 9.5KWh of storage at a charge/discharge rate of 3KW, and it's (if we ever want to) expandable with more batteries and more inverters. As we are on the Octopus Go tariff for our car, we are getting 4 hours of very cheap (7.5p/KWh) electricity with which to charge both the car and the battery, which we can then use over the course of the rest of the day and top up from the solar panels. We can link it to the solar panels so it knows what's being generated, and also to the car charger infrastructure.  

GivEnergy 9.5 battery

I suspect it will take a little exploration and fine-tuning to optimise things so we use as little peak rate (35p!!!!) power as possible, but barring days when the office heat pump (more on THAT later, I guess) is on, we should be able to offset most of our power consumption to the cheap night rate. 

More info as and when it's installed, and hopefully periodic updates after that as we tune the settings. My initial back-of-envelope maths (and a big spreadsheet) suggest we could potentially save £1000 a year at current (exorbitant) energy prices, which represents a pretty decent ROI.

To answer the obvious question, yes the battery can be used as a backup during power outages. 

[1] For those wondering why we didn't use Hereward Solar Solutions, who fitted our panels. the simple answer is the company quietly folded without notifying their customers in 2017. Caveat emptor, I guess. 

Back and greener

Zappi secured on our carport end
wall. Installation by Artisan Electrics

We've been sort of ticking along with the solar etc until late last year, when we bought an EV, specifically an 80KWh Skoda Enyaq, and as a result also had a myenergi Zappi charging point installed.

We've been considering an EV for a good while, but the major consideration has been that both sets of our parents are a) 100 miles away in opposite directions and b) not getting any younger, so we have been waiting on an EV that can do a round trip to either with charge to spare, and (in an ideal world) is made by Skoda, as we've both been driving Skodas for the past decade or more and we're fans. 

More detail in subsequent posts, but suffice it to say the car is a dream to drive, we've not had anything that could be described as range anxiety in 6 months (this does require a mindset change, of which more later), and the myenergi monitoring and control system is an absolute delight. 

Look out for more posts in the coming days.