Another great video - and thanks for the shoutout! What I like about your videos is that you take the time to explain everything in a clear way, with good visuals as well 🙂
I'm off grid and use a simple diverter I designed which looks at array voltage ad when it is higher than expected power point voltage. I diverts proportionately from 5 to 1200W, just enough to drop the voltage back to power point. It is in the same price range and doesn't use any battery, charge controller, or inverter resources. No need to even change heater element. It is amazing what small amounts of power add up to thru the day. I finally after years removed my propane heater. Hard to imagine there aren't better products out there to heat water with PV at a reasonable price.
Another common sense video with a good balance of humour, brilliant. I love how you clearly explain the options and giving people enough information to work out what is best for them. Having taken early retirement, I have taken the hands on approach over automation. I have busy days doing the washing etc when the sun shines and then 'rest days' when it's cloudy, where I can take time to enjoy reviewing content on how other 'solar watchers' are making the best of their systems.
Thanks for the feedback - I'm glad you're enjoying them 👍 I'm now pretty much retired too, although it doesn't feel like that as my days are full .... Don't know how I ever had time to go to work 😂 The great thing about getting loads of feedback - whether it's good or bad - is that it spawns loads of ideas for future videos. Do keep watching as I should have my April review out in the next few days. Cheers, Chris
Our solution is somewhat atypical because we have two 5kw systems wired up to a two phase supply. Split phase allows us to dedicate a whole 5kw system to just hot water and export while the other powers the rest of the house. Our diverter is just a big switch. We crank it up when the net output is enough to avoid import. Crude yes. Effective, very.
Hi Joschmoyo, Wow - 10kW - puts my 4.5kW system in the shade, if you pardon the pun. Sounds great, although I've got this mental picture of one of those big pull down switches they use for electric chairs... :-). Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home No, we are not trying raise the dead with solar. Just trying to avoid massive bill's. Our switch is a standard isolating switch next to the tank. It took time to get to 10 kW though. We did not do it all in one hit. But our energy bill's are minuscule or in credit sometimes. Most people are getting gouged now by power companies. Best money we ever invested. Eventually we will take half of the system off grid.
The only issue with Tuya is it needs your wifi details and is controlled from the cloud, you could consider the Shelly switches which contain a web server so can be operated locally or via some automation solutions like Home Assistant
I created a diverter that exactly matches solar excess when my battery is full. It's made with a sonoff pow elite, ecsb32 and a silicon controlled rectifier. It cost £45 and is automated through home assistant. Lovely stuff!
Hi. I've built my own system as well using a Arduino Nano Every to count S0 pulses from 3 meters (PV gen, consumption and purchase - I calculate the export). The counts are read every x mins by a Rasp Pi Zero that then send an on/off signal by zigbee to a Sonoff switch. There is a web interface and logging - so lots of stats. The immersion element is 1kW. Problem is the Sonoff is just on/off whenever I'm exporting > 1Kw. I need to have a controller that varies the energy but have yet to find a product or a circuit. Can you give a source for yours please. Alan
If you use the tuya app, you could have it turn on automatically, if you added a tuya smart life energy meter, and then link the 2 up so that it turns on only when exporting, that's about 30 quid 😊
Your boiler maybe c90% efficient but if you have long pipes to your immersion then there will be lots of heat loss. My wife was complaining as the pipes run under her bedroom floor and in the summer the room gets too hot. So in the summer electric immersion is best despite being on 100% green gas (bio generated from Green Energy UK). I suspect there is very little lagging but I'm not prepared to lift chipboard floors to find out - that's a very difficult job and the boards will run under the upstairs stud walls! One thing I found is that even with loads of extra insulation on the immersion tank there is still noticeable heat loss overnight - probably through all the pipework to and from the tank (yes, they are insulated where this is possible). As I mention in some replies to others I built my own PV diverter system (don't have battery storage yet). It still needs some enhancements but I'm getting lots of stats to my web front end without any data going off to the cloud. If it's a cloudy day then it will heat the tank in the evening. One enhancement would be to then switch on the gas water heating rather than the electric immersion.
Whilst we have a relatively short pipe runs between boiler and hot water tank, I know for certain they're not insulated - with the benefit of hindsight, there are a number of areas where we could have improved insulation throughout the house when we bought it 25+ years ago. We did cavity wall insulation and of course loft insulation, but insulating all the hot pipes just didn't get a look in at the time - maybe there wasn't quite as much focus on the cost of energy then, who knows... I fully accept that my solution was simple and with that comes obvious limitations, but given the current tariff rates, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for me to divert any excess solar at the moment, but of course that might change ... Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home Thanks Chris. We've also done cavity wall insulation and of lots of extra insulation - the first was with a 100% grant and the 2nd is cheap to do but I have to watch for condensation in the loft. I agree your gains may be marginal. You are getting the most benefits with the battery storage. I wish I installed BS earlier - now companies tell me they are not taking orders as they can't supply and have a big backlog. Ideally I need more PV panels but the unused roof is facing NW and smaller, so not brilliant. Might get 2.5 kWp with super efficient panels.
Subbed Chris - great info in this video. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a gas fired hot water heater with no electric element built in. I was thinking of getting an electric water heater, hooking it up to our solar system using a solution like you suggest. The difference is the electric hot water would feed the gas hot water service with preheated water. Hopefully this will reduce the gas bill and use the excess electricity from our solar panels. We get nothing for our excess exported to the grid.
Hi Ben, Thanks for the positive feedback. I can't get over your last sentence ... no payment for exports to the grid !!! Is that just your utility company, or is that pretty much the picture for the whole of Aus? In terms of pre-heating the water, it sounds attractive, but I'm no heating/plumbing engineer so I'd imagine it might need some careful consideration, especially for any possible safety issues.
@@handyman-at-home Its our particular utility company - they give you something like 8c /kWh but jack up your normal power by 10c /kWh, so I chose not to register for feed in tariff as it would have cost me more. A scam basically. I aren't qualified either but it seems to me that if the thermostat on the electric hot water heater is a few degrees less than the gas hot water heater it should be no different than feeding it with normal temperature mains water.
Your system could allow the immersion heater to be on when surplus electric generated is only say 100W so you would be importing 2.9kW or sucking it out of the battery. Immersun for example diverts ONLY the electricity that would have been exported to the immersion heater. So in cloudy conditions the immersion might only get 200W but in good sun the full 3kW. In this case no power is taken from the battery or the grid
Hi Ralph, Fully accept this is a limitation of my cheap and cheerful solution. In practice we were only ever using it on very sunny days in August and September, and for a couple of hours at that, so we never actually drew any power from the grid in practice. Once the Octopus export tariff doubled we pretty much stopped using it, apart from the odd occasion. Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home In our case we are on the old style Feed In Tariff where we are deemed to export 50% of what is generated. So it is in our interest to use all electricity that would otherwise be exported to the grid.
I can confirm that an iBoost does struggle when a battery is in the system, mine worked very well until a Powerwall was added but now as it can't "see' the battery it sometimes (randomly) starts heating the hot water. Apparently a modified ct clamp is available for around £60 which will cure the problem but this increase the excess generation required to operate iBoost and you end up exporting a noticeable (250 watts) amount so I'm not getting this. Looks like an "eddie" is the best bet (I already have a zappi car charger) but for the moment I just turn on the hot water manually when there is plenty of power in the battery and we want a shower - the iBoost at least uses the top immersion first so it doesn't take long to heat the water up. Both the Powerwall and zappi are very good at using all solar generation and not letting any slip by into the grid, iBoost with its standard ct clamp lets around 100 watts export before working.
Interesting - thanks for that - sounds like there was some basis to the comments they made to me. We've not started looking into EVs just yet - hoping to squeeze another couple of years out of the current (petrol) models - but I have seen other good feedback on the zappi charger.
I am looking to use a diverter to switch excess solar to a dedicated 240 V socket so I can leave my car plugged in on the granny cable / charger set to 8 or 10 Amps.
@@handyman-at-home Not sure as it depends on the load and if the switch accepts resistive loads or others. Fairly sure a simple charger is just on off.
Great video. I have been on the lookout for a similar device. My booiler uses 3 phases (400 volts) and it seems that the unit you found is for one phase electricity, right?
Thanks for the great feedback Morten. Yes, the unit I used is only for single phase (240VAC). I didn't see anything like it for 3 phase when I was looking for it. The only suggestion I could make is whether you could use this unit to pull in (energise) 3 separate contactors, one for each phase. A bit more 'home brew' but I would think it should work...?
Hi, Sorry if it was a bit quiet - I've not totally got to grips with the audio controls in PowerDirector just yet. Will try to review the audio a bit more on the next one.
Hi Tony, It's not you - apologies for the poor sound levels - I've been struggling with the PowerDirector audio features. Think I'm getting there on my last couple of vids, but this one was not great.
You could save a lot more money by using scrap Automotive batteries, and a relay that diverts to a freezer size external Zeolite clay tank, to hot air dry it out when your batteries reach a certain voltage. You will get 3 to 10 times more energy from your panels to your batteries directly without a charge controller. Ten times as much in cloudy winter weather for sure. You. Just add moist Air or water drip to get thermal energy back from the kitty litter zeolite clay pellets. And you can disconnect from the grid and sell your expensive batteries and electronics. You have enough panels to power the whole block, at least a dozen houses not just your house. 140watts if panels powers my house and all my transport needs. Of course if you are stupid enough to use inverters and mains AC appliances and lighting, then you will need ten times more panels and batteries than me.
@@davidjohnmoroney why do you think it is not stupid to turn low voltage DC, into high voltage AC, for which you need to deal with bueracrazy and expensive electrical engineers and electricians, and lose over half your energy doing that with an inverter. And then lose up to 90% of what's left to turn that AC back into the same low voltage DC, that you had in the first place, which you need to run a computer, or Television, or Energy efficient LED lighting system? It would seem that using 250watts to run a laptop, when you can cut the cable and run it directly on 20W of 12 or 18V DC is stupid, yes? And as for very loud heavy and noisy 240VAC "universal" brushed DC motors in mains powered powertools, vacuum cleaners, etc. Does it not strike you as stupid that the reason they are so loud, heavy, noisy, and expensive is that instead of lightweight and inexpensive permanent magnets, and 20 times less windings of 20 times fatter and more robust wires on the armature that a twenty times more efficient brushed low voltage DC motor has, they apply a reversing current 50 times to a huge chunk of wire wound laminated iron electromagnet for their field coils, and the armature also, so as to turn 90% of the wattage passing through them into noise, vibration, heat, and chaotic harmonics of dirty EMF radiation? As also is occurring with the inverter BTW. For this reason, a cheap 200W energy consumption by a cordless 18V skillsaw or vacuum cleaner running by a lead to a 24V battery bank is just as poweful as a 240VAC one using 2000W. So, you see, I am compelled to describe it as stupid to waste 95% of your generation capacity and multiply the cost of your system by 100 times, and reduce its reliability by at least a thousand times to do nothing but fill your house with acoustic and Electromagnetic radiation that scrambles your brain and DNA. If you can come up with a reason that rationally explains why this behaviour is not stupid, please do explain. Perhaps your priorities are impressing the neighborhood by how many children in the Congo have died to mine the strategic minerals in your system? Or you are socially minded and believe that dying younger from Dementia or stroke or cardiovascular failure or cancer, so offspring can inherit the tangle of gimmickry is a valid case? Or is it simply income for promotion of such consumer baubles that convinces you that this is not stupid? Whatever. If you had some money to spend, it would cost you less to just buy some Edison Nickel Iron batteries from China. They cost less than the lithium rubbish, are unkillable, and still run as good as new after 100 years in electric cars built before WW1. Which still outperform the best electric cars of today in range and efficiency BTW. Which is of course why the US production of consumer NiFe batteries was bought up and shut down by Exide in the 1970s. But for Military, Industral, Mining Aircraft, Shipping. They still use them. Because reliability and efficiency counts. Saves lives and dollars. While with the factory farmed consumer it's the opposite. Sickness, inefficiency, and constant failure and maintenance costs keep them busy and part them with their money. What does Forest Gumps Mom say? "Stupid is as stupid does. "
Nice solution but have you looked at setting up HomeAssistant it's not difficult there are loads of videos about it. HomeAssistant can control Tuya devices either using the Tuya cloud or totally offline and also monitor your solar generation, usage and export so can easily save your brain power and get loads of brownie points from the wife for being so clever. Be careful though HomeAssistant can be very addictive and as Paul Hibbert says on his channel; "You may never have sex again!" nice vid though keep it up and you may add a zero to the end of your subs. 😀
Hi Steve, Thanks for the great feedback - I'll show your comment to the wife and see what she has to say ....🤣 More seriously ... I have watched a couple of vids about HomeAssistant and might be tempted to dabble with it a bit Main problem at the moment is lack of time, despite being pretty much retired. I don't know how I ever had the time to go to work ... Cheers Chris
Slight problem with your gas efficiency figures. Gas burning is reckoned to be no more than about 60% efficient, according to the installers whom I've asked. (Coincidentally, a gas cooking ring I saw recently in a shop was marked clearly '59% efficiency'.) So your boiler efficiency can never be higher than that figure.
Hi, Thanks for your comment. I've no specific expertise in this area so have just gone on what I've read in various articles. My understanding is that most modern boilers are ‘condensing’ boilers, like mine, which recover heat that was previously lost via the flue, so achieving efficiencies above 90% if properly setup. I used the following web page specifically as reference ... www.theheatinghub.co.uk/boiler-efficiency-guide-and-energy-saving-tips ... but have seen similar content on many others. But, as I say, I don't claim any specific expertise or practical knowledge in this area - I was always more a 'sparky'... Cheers Chris
Rather crude - I wouldn’t call this a diverter per se more a remote switch - having had PV for over 10 years and a proportional triac driven home brew diverter for most of that, pretty much all my excess went into DHW until I added a small battery last year - prior to that for 250 days of the year we used no gas for DHW (8kWh per day on gas roughly but the immersion can add more energy on sunny days) - I expect that will reduce to around 200 due to the battery taking precedence. Either way even the cheapest off the shelf proportional diverter makes more sense than the simple on/off switch as the danger is you end up paying for anything you’d have saved by accidently leaving it on or on cloudy/sunny days - that said if your export rate is greater than that for gas then it may make sense to leave it be…my thinking is self generation and use for whatever purpose is the most efficient….
Hi. I've built my own system as well using a Arduino Nano Every to count S0 pulses from 3 meters (PV gen, consumption and purchase - I calculate the export). The counts are read every x mins by a Rasp Pi Zero that then send an on/off signal by zigbee to a Sonoff switch. There is a web interface and logging - so lots of stats. The immersion element is 1kW. Problem is the Sonoff is just on/off whenever I'm exporting > 1Kw. I need to have a controller that varies the energy but have yet to find a product or a circuit. Can you give a source for yours please. Alan
@@Alan_UK I’m using the openenergymonitor emontx v3 as the monitor - very similar to what you’re doing measuring the meters - the arduino code is called the PLL diverter but there is an alternative known as the Mk2 router - they work in similar ways by firing a triac (essentially a solid state relay) proportional to the amount of excess available, however this is based on available energy rather than power alone so diverts every spare WattSecond of energy - I modified the code to suit my set up and calibrate it - there are newer versions of the hardware that run on a RPi with arduino so have a look 👍
Another great video - and thanks for the shoutout! What I like about your videos is that you take the time to explain everything in a clear way, with good visuals as well 🙂
Thanks Gary. 👍
I'm off grid and use a simple diverter I designed which looks at array voltage ad when it is higher than expected power point voltage. I diverts proportionately from 5 to 1200W, just enough to drop the voltage back to power point. It is in the same price range and doesn't use any battery, charge controller, or inverter resources. No need to even change heater element. It is amazing what small amounts of power add up to thru the day. I finally after years removed my propane heater. Hard to imagine there aren't better products out there to heat water with PV at a reasonable price.
Another common sense video with a good balance of humour, brilliant. I love how you clearly explain the options and giving people enough information to work out what is best for them. Having taken early retirement, I have taken the hands on approach over automation. I have busy days doing the washing etc when the sun shines and then 'rest days' when it's cloudy, where I can take time to enjoy reviewing content on how other 'solar watchers' are making the best of their systems.
Thanks for the feedback - I'm glad you're enjoying them 👍 I'm now pretty much retired too, although it doesn't feel like that as my days are full .... Don't know how I ever had time to go to work 😂 The great thing about getting loads of feedback - whether it's good or bad - is that it spawns loads of ideas for future videos. Do keep watching as I should have my April review out in the next few days. Cheers, Chris
Your logic sounds about right to me… it’s not hard to work out when the sun is shining is it.! 👍👍
Thanks Dave
Our solution is somewhat atypical because we have two 5kw systems wired up to a two phase supply. Split phase allows us to dedicate a whole 5kw system to just hot water and export while the other powers the rest of the house.
Our diverter is just a big switch. We crank it up when the net output is enough to avoid import. Crude yes. Effective, very.
Hi Joschmoyo, Wow - 10kW - puts my 4.5kW system in the shade, if you pardon the pun. Sounds great, although I've got this mental picture of one of those big pull down switches they use for electric chairs... :-). Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home
No, we are not trying raise the dead with solar. Just trying to avoid massive bill's. Our switch is a standard isolating switch next to the tank. It took time to get to 10 kW though. We did not do it all in one hit. But our energy bill's are minuscule or in credit sometimes.
Most people are getting gouged now by power companies. Best money we ever invested.
Eventually we will take half of the system off grid.
The only issue with Tuya is it needs your wifi details and is controlled from the cloud, you could consider the Shelly switches which contain a web server so can be operated locally or via some automation solutions like Home Assistant
Tuya is now available as a local app on HA
I created a diverter that exactly matches solar excess when my battery is full. It's made with a sonoff pow elite, ecsb32 and a silicon controlled rectifier. It cost £45 and is automated through home assistant. Lovely stuff!
Hi. I've built my own system as well using a Arduino Nano Every to count S0 pulses from 3 meters (PV gen, consumption and purchase - I calculate the export). The counts are read every x mins by a Rasp Pi Zero that then send an on/off signal by zigbee to a Sonoff switch. There is a web interface and logging - so lots of stats. The immersion element is 1kW. Problem is the Sonoff is just on/off whenever I'm exporting > 1Kw. I need to have a controller that varies the energy but have yet to find a product or a circuit. Can you give a source for yours please. Alan
@@pumpkinhead456 That was a quick reply!! I will go and have a look. Many thanks :)
These sound great. Cheers, Chris
If you use the tuya app, you could have it turn on automatically, if you added a tuya smart life energy meter, and then link the 2 up so that it turns on only when exporting, that's about 30 quid 😊
In South Africa we do not get paid anything for feeding excess solar power back in to the grid, so such a device is definitely worth it.
Wow - I didn't know that. Seems a bit of a rip-off! Most of the larger UK utility companies have now started to do this, but not all 😞
Reflects my experience very usefully.
Thanks Brian 👍
Your boiler maybe c90% efficient but if you have long pipes to your immersion then there will be lots of heat loss. My wife was complaining as the pipes run under her bedroom floor and in the summer the room gets too hot. So in the summer electric immersion is best despite being on 100% green gas (bio generated from Green Energy UK). I suspect there is very little lagging but I'm not prepared to lift chipboard floors to find out - that's a very difficult job and the boards will run under the upstairs stud walls!
One thing I found is that even with loads of extra insulation on the immersion tank there is still noticeable heat loss overnight - probably through all the pipework to and from the tank (yes, they are insulated where this is possible).
As I mention in some replies to others I built my own PV diverter system (don't have battery storage yet). It still needs some enhancements but I'm getting lots of stats to my web front end without any data going off to the cloud. If it's a cloudy day then it will heat the tank in the evening. One enhancement would be to then switch on the gas water heating rather than the electric immersion.
Whilst we have a relatively short pipe runs between boiler and hot water tank, I know for certain they're not insulated - with the benefit of hindsight, there are a number of areas where we could have improved insulation throughout the house when we bought it 25+ years ago.
We did cavity wall insulation and of course loft insulation, but insulating all the hot pipes just didn't get a look in at the time - maybe there wasn't quite as much focus on the cost of energy then, who knows...
I fully accept that my solution was simple and with that comes obvious limitations, but given the current tariff rates, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for me to divert any excess solar at the moment, but of course that might change ...
Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home Thanks Chris. We've also done cavity wall insulation and of lots of extra insulation - the first was with a 100% grant and the 2nd is cheap to do but I have to watch for condensation in the loft. I agree your gains may be marginal. You are getting the most benefits with the battery storage. I wish I installed BS earlier - now companies tell me they are not taking orders as they can't supply and have a big backlog. Ideally I need more PV panels but the unused roof is facing NW and smaller, so not brilliant. Might get 2.5 kWp with super efficient panels.
Subbed Chris - great info in this video.
Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a gas fired hot water heater with no electric element built in. I was thinking of getting an electric water heater, hooking it up to our solar system using a solution like you suggest. The difference is the electric hot water would feed the gas hot water service with preheated water. Hopefully this will reduce the gas bill and use the excess electricity from our solar panels. We get nothing for our excess exported to the grid.
Hi Ben, Thanks for the positive feedback. I can't get over your last sentence ... no payment for exports to the grid !!! Is that just your utility company, or is that pretty much the picture for the whole of Aus? In terms of pre-heating the water, it sounds attractive, but I'm no heating/plumbing engineer so I'd imagine it might need some careful consideration, especially for any possible safety issues.
@@handyman-at-home Its our particular utility company - they give you something like 8c /kWh but jack up your normal power by 10c /kWh, so I chose not to register for feed in tariff as it would have cost me more. A scam basically.
I aren't qualified either but it seems to me that if the thermostat on the electric hot water heater is a few degrees less than the gas hot water heater it should be no different than feeding it with normal temperature mains water.
Your system could allow the immersion heater to be on when surplus electric generated is only say 100W so you would be importing 2.9kW or sucking it out of the battery. Immersun for example diverts ONLY the electricity that would have been exported to the immersion heater. So in cloudy conditions the immersion might only get 200W but in good sun the full 3kW. In this case no power is taken from the battery or the grid
Hi Ralph, Fully accept this is a limitation of my cheap and cheerful solution. In practice we were only ever using it on very sunny days in August and September, and for a couple of hours at that, so we never actually drew any power from the grid in practice. Once the Octopus export tariff doubled we pretty much stopped using it, apart from the odd occasion. Cheers, Chris
@@handyman-at-home In our case we are on the old style Feed In Tariff where we are deemed to export 50% of what is generated. So it is in our interest to use all electricity that would otherwise be exported to the grid.
I can confirm that an iBoost does struggle when a battery is in the system, mine worked very well until a Powerwall was added but now as it can't "see' the battery it sometimes (randomly) starts heating the hot water. Apparently a modified ct clamp is available for around £60 which will cure the problem but this increase the excess generation required to operate iBoost and you end up exporting a noticeable (250 watts) amount so I'm not getting this. Looks like an "eddie" is the best bet (I already have a zappi car charger) but for the moment I just turn on the hot water manually when there is plenty of power in the battery and we want a shower - the iBoost at least uses the top immersion first so it doesn't take long to heat the water up. Both the Powerwall and zappi are very good at using all solar generation and not letting any slip by into the grid, iBoost with its standard ct clamp lets around 100 watts export before working.
Interesting - thanks for that - sounds like there was some basis to the comments they made to me. We've not started looking into EVs just yet - hoping to squeeze another couple of years out of the current (petrol) models - but I have seen other good feedback on the zappi charger.
I am looking to use a diverter to switch excess solar to a dedicated 240 V socket so I can leave my car plugged in on the granny cable / charger set to 8 or 10 Amps.
Are you planning to buy an off-the-shelf product, and if so, which do you think you'll go for? Chris
@@handyman-at-home Not sure as it depends on the load and if the switch accepts resistive loads or others. Fairly sure a simple charger is just on off.
Great video. I have been on the lookout for a similar device. My booiler uses 3 phases (400 volts) and it seems that the unit you found is for one phase electricity, right?
Thanks for the great feedback Morten. Yes, the unit I used is only for single phase (240VAC). I didn't see anything like it for 3 phase when I was looking for it. The only suggestion I could make is whether you could use this unit to pull in (energise) 3 separate contactors, one for each phase. A bit more 'home brew' but I would think it should work...?
So helpful Thanks
Thanks!
i use a tuya ct clamp setup, to balance and see when im exporting
Can you turn the mic volume up plz
Hi, Sorry if it was a bit quiet - I've not totally got to grips with the audio controls in PowerDirector just yet. Will try to review the audio a bit more on the next one.
It’s annoying that they pay the major generators the same strike price as gas but home energy generators a pittance.
Is it just me? - The volume is too low. My speakers are on max and I can hardly hear you!
Hi Tony, It's not you - apologies for the poor sound levels - I've been struggling with the PowerDirector audio features. Think I'm getting there on my last couple of vids, but this one was not great.
Sound is too low.
Hi, Yes - sorry about that - I agree.... I've been struggling to get to grips with the audio level control in PowerDirector.
You could save a lot more money by using scrap Automotive batteries, and a relay that diverts to a freezer size external Zeolite clay tank, to hot air dry it out when your batteries reach a certain voltage.
You will get 3 to 10 times more energy from your panels to your batteries directly without a charge controller. Ten times as much in cloudy winter weather for sure.
You. Just add moist Air or water drip to get thermal energy back from the kitty litter zeolite clay pellets.
And you can disconnect from the grid and sell your expensive batteries and electronics.
You have enough panels to power the whole block, at least a dozen houses not just your house.
140watts if panels powers my house and all my transport needs.
Of course if you are stupid enough to use inverters and mains AC appliances and lighting, then you will need ten times more panels and batteries than me.
As soon as you wrote "Of course if you are stupid enough....." I stopped reading.
@@davidjohnmoroney why do you think it is not stupid to turn low voltage DC, into high voltage AC, for which you need to deal with bueracrazy and expensive electrical engineers and electricians, and lose over half your energy doing that with an inverter.
And then lose up to 90% of what's left to turn that AC back into the same low voltage DC, that you had in the first place, which you need to run a computer, or Television, or Energy efficient LED lighting system?
It would seem that using 250watts to run a laptop, when you can cut the cable and run it directly on 20W of 12 or 18V DC is stupid, yes?
And as for very loud heavy and noisy 240VAC "universal" brushed DC motors in mains powered powertools, vacuum cleaners, etc.
Does it not strike you as stupid that the reason they are so loud, heavy, noisy, and expensive is that instead of lightweight and inexpensive permanent magnets, and 20 times less windings of 20 times fatter and more robust wires on the armature that a twenty times more efficient brushed low voltage DC motor has, they apply a reversing current 50 times to a huge chunk of wire wound laminated iron electromagnet for their field coils, and the armature also, so as to turn 90% of the wattage passing through them into noise, vibration, heat, and chaotic harmonics of dirty EMF radiation?
As also is occurring with the inverter BTW.
For this reason, a cheap 200W energy consumption by a cordless 18V skillsaw or vacuum cleaner running by a lead to a 24V battery bank is just as poweful as a 240VAC one using 2000W.
So, you see, I am compelled to describe it as stupid to waste 95% of your generation capacity and multiply the cost of your system by 100 times, and reduce its reliability by at least a thousand times to do nothing but fill your house with acoustic and Electromagnetic radiation that scrambles your brain and DNA.
If you can come up with a reason that rationally explains why this behaviour is not stupid, please do explain.
Perhaps your priorities are impressing the neighborhood by how many children in the Congo have died to mine the strategic minerals in your system?
Or you are socially minded and believe that dying younger from Dementia or stroke or cardiovascular failure or cancer, so offspring can inherit the tangle of gimmickry is a valid case?
Or is it simply income for promotion of such consumer baubles that convinces you that this is not stupid?
Whatever.
If you had some money to spend, it would cost you less to just buy some Edison Nickel Iron batteries from China. They cost less than the lithium rubbish, are unkillable, and still run as good as new after 100 years in electric cars built before WW1.
Which still outperform the best electric cars of today in range and efficiency BTW.
Which is of course why the US production of consumer NiFe batteries was bought up and shut down by Exide in the 1970s.
But for Military, Industral, Mining Aircraft, Shipping.
They still use them. Because reliability and efficiency counts. Saves lives and dollars.
While with the factory farmed consumer it's the opposite. Sickness, inefficiency, and constant failure and maintenance costs keep them busy and part them with their money.
What does Forest Gumps Mom say?
"Stupid is as stupid does. "
Nice solution but have you looked at setting up HomeAssistant it's not difficult there are loads of videos about it. HomeAssistant can control Tuya devices either using the Tuya cloud or totally offline and also monitor your solar generation, usage and export so can easily save your brain power and get loads of brownie points from the wife for being so clever. Be careful though HomeAssistant can be very addictive and as Paul Hibbert says on his channel; "You may never have sex again!" nice vid though keep it up and you may add a zero to the end of your subs. 😀
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the great feedback - I'll show your comment to the wife and see what she has to say ....🤣
More seriously ... I have watched a couple of vids about HomeAssistant and might be tempted to dabble with it a bit
Main problem at the moment is lack of time, despite being pretty much retired.
I don't know how I ever had the time to go to work ...
Cheers
Chris
Slight problem with your gas efficiency figures. Gas burning is reckoned to be no more than about 60% efficient, according to the installers whom I've asked. (Coincidentally, a gas cooking ring I saw recently in a shop was marked clearly '59% efficiency'.) So your boiler efficiency can never be higher than that figure.
Hi,
Thanks for your comment. I've no specific expertise in this area so have just gone on what I've read in various articles. My understanding is that most modern boilers are ‘condensing’ boilers, like mine, which recover heat that was previously lost via the flue, so achieving efficiencies above 90% if properly setup.
I used the following web page specifically as reference ... www.theheatinghub.co.uk/boiler-efficiency-guide-and-energy-saving-tips ... but have seen similar content on many others. But, as I say, I don't claim any specific expertise or practical knowledge in this area - I was always more a 'sparky'...
Cheers
Chris
Rather crude - I wouldn’t call this a diverter per se more a remote switch - having had PV for over 10 years and a proportional triac driven home brew diverter for most of that, pretty much all my excess went into DHW until I added a small battery last year - prior to that for 250 days of the year we used no gas for DHW (8kWh per day on gas roughly but the immersion can add more energy on sunny days) - I expect that will reduce to around 200 due to the battery taking precedence. Either way even the cheapest off the shelf proportional diverter makes more sense than the simple on/off switch as the danger is you end up paying for anything you’d have saved by accidently leaving it on or on cloudy/sunny days - that said if your export rate is greater than that for gas then it may make sense to leave it be…my thinking is self generation and use for whatever purpose is the most efficient….
Hi. I've built my own system as well using a Arduino Nano Every to count S0 pulses from 3 meters (PV gen, consumption and purchase - I calculate the export). The counts are read every x mins by a Rasp Pi Zero that then send an on/off signal by zigbee to a Sonoff switch. There is a web interface and logging - so lots of stats. The immersion element is 1kW. Problem is the Sonoff is just on/off whenever I'm exporting > 1Kw. I need to have a controller that varies the energy but have yet to find a product or a circuit. Can you give a source for yours please. Alan
@@Alan_UK I’m using the openenergymonitor emontx v3 as the monitor - very similar to what you’re doing measuring the meters - the arduino code is called the PLL diverter but there is an alternative known as the Mk2 router - they work in similar ways by firing a triac (essentially a solid state relay) proportional to the amount of excess available, however this is based on available energy rather than power alone so diverts every spare WattSecond of energy - I modified the code to suit my set up and calibrate it - there are newer versions of the hardware that run on a RPi with arduino so have a look 👍
@@Umski That was a quick reply!! I will look into the Mk2 pi version. Many thanks.