Solar Panels

[lpm]

Interesting.

Glitches like this will happen to early adopters. A bit like when the first bronze axe broke on its first outing, and Ogg went to advanced settings and discovered it needed more tin.

In another year you'll look out the window and will have an instinctive feel of what your generation is.

[EACLucifer]

Interesting.

Glitches like this will happen to early adopters. A bit like when the first bronze axe broke on its first outing, and Ogg went to advanced settings and discovered it needed more tin.

Less tin. Breaking would be due to too much tin, failing to take an edge due to too little tin.

Anywhere the first bronzes were arsenical, not stannic.

[lpm]

Interesting.

Glitches like this will happen to early adopters. A bit like when the first bronze axe broke on its first outing, and Ogg went to advanced settings and discovered it needed more tin.

Less tin. Breaking would be due to too much tin, failing to take an edge due to too little tin.

Anywhere the first bronzes were arsenical, not stannic.

5,000 years ago Ogg got a new bronzer maker in who expressed contempt for the previous guy. "He used arsenic did he? Not what I'd've done. And look at the mess he made of the hilt. I'm going to have to melt it down and start again. This is what happens when you go for the cheapest quote."

[EACLucifer]

Interesting.

Glitches like this will happen to early adopters. A bit like when the first bronze axe broke on its first outing, and Ogg went to advanced settings and discovered it needed more tin.

Less tin. Breaking would be due to too much tin, failing to take an edge due to too little tin.

Anywhere the first bronzes were arsenical, not stannic.

5,000 years ago Ogg got a new bronzer maker in who expressed contempt for the previous guy. "He used arsenic did he? Not what I'd've done. And look at the mess he made of the hilt. I'm going to have to melt it down and start again. This is what happens when you go for the cheapest quote."

The old bronze maker was not in a position to complain about this characterisation due to the peripheral neuropathy.

[Grumble]

So Ripple are going to have a vote around changing from a fixed price renegotiated each year to bidding for a CFD. A lot of Co-op members are not happy.

26 minute presentation below

https://youtu.be/qxYNWqvukZU?si=nUjb3I4fI3Xtpvxl

[bjn]

I bought into Kirk Hill for two reasons, one was a hedge against volatile prices, the other was to invest in green generation. Moving to a CfD gets a fixed price and so loses the hedge against price volatility. If prices are low, my return from Kirk hill will be low, but so will my electricity bill. When prices are high, I’ll get a higher return to cover my higher bills. I’d like to keep the hedge and so would vote no. Ivan or LPM will probably come along in a few minutes and tell me why I’m wrong.

[lpm]

Don't see why you are wrong.

Impossible to say which is going to be better, financially. Can't see it matters much. But as you say, keeping the current structure protects against upwards spikes in prices. Prefer not to chuck that benefit away, so also a No.

[lpm]

A lot of Co-op members are not happy.

I read some of the comments on that forum thing. Think it shows Ripple is a failure in terms of having an understandable structure. A lot of people have invested without understanding. Several have invested under the impression that they get in effect 27p per kWh. And still don't understand how ordinary electricity bills work.

Caveat emptor and all that, but the average Brit is too thick for their scheme.

[IvanV]

A friend recently had solar panels and battery fitted. He has gone with an Octopus scheme where they top up your battery at night from the grid at low prices, and then algorithms will decide how much of that you discharge back to the grid to earn profit at higher prices the next day, or just use it yourself, depending on how much you might get from the sun during the day. He's very happy, though I would have thought it worthwhile getting a bit bigger battery than the 6kWh he has if you are going to do that, at least to have enough for a day's use, more like 10kWh.

I don't think my equipment is sophisticated enough to join such a service. He can manage his inverter with a web-app - and indeed delegate Octopus to do that in real time - which is the trick. Whereas you have to press buttons on my inverter.

[Imrael]

A friend recently had solar panels and battery fitted. He has gone with an Octopus scheme where they top up your battery at night from the grid at low prices, and then algorithms will decide how much of that you discharge back to the grid to earn profit at higher prices the next day, or just use it yourself, depending on how much you might get from the sun during the day. He's very happy, though I would have thought it worthwhile getting a bit bigger battery than the 6kWh he has if you are going to do that, at least to have enough for a day's use, more like 10kWh.

I don't think my equipment is sophisticated enough to join such a service. He can manage his inverter with a web-app - and indeed delegate Octopus to do that in real time - which is the trick. Whereas you have to press buttons on my inverter.

I have a 12 kWh which can certainly do several hours. It does frustrate me a bit that the much larger battery in my car isnt available for this purpose. I know a few manufacturers are doing this, and it seems very sensible. Although maybe a bit niche in terms of how much of the right compatible tech you have to buy.

[Woodchopper]

A friend recently had solar panels and battery fitted. He has gone with an Octopus scheme where they top up your battery at night from the grid at low prices, and then algorithms will decide how much of that you discharge back to the grid to earn profit at higher prices the next day, or just use it yourself, depending on how much you might get from the sun during the day. He's very happy, though I would have thought it worthwhile getting a bit bigger battery than the 6kWh he has if you are going to do that, at least to have enough for a day's use, more like 10kWh.

I don't think my equipment is sophisticated enough to join such a service. He can manage his inverter with a web-app - and indeed delegate Octopus to do that in real time - which is the trick. Whereas you have to press buttons on my inverter.

I have a 12 kWh which can certainly do several hours. It does frustrate me a bit that the much larger battery in my car isnt available for this purpose. I know a few manufacturers are doing this, and it seems very sensible. Although maybe a bit niche in terms of how much of the right compatible tech you have to buy.

Likely a dumb question, but would use of a car battery for day to day storage reduce the long term life of the battery? I'm assuming that it would have a lot more charge/discharge cycles than typical use for private transport.

[Imrael]

A friend recently had solar panels and battery fitted. He has gone with an Octopus scheme where they top up your battery at night from the grid at low prices, and then algorithms will decide how much of that you discharge back to the grid to earn profit at higher prices the next day, or just use it yourself, depending on how much you might get from the sun during the day. He's very happy, though I would have thought it worthwhile getting a bit bigger battery than the 6kWh he has if you are going to do that, at least to have enough for a day's use, more like 10kWh.

I don't think my equipment is sophisticated enough to join such a service. He can manage his inverter with a web-app - and indeed delegate Octopus to do that in real time - which is the trick. Whereas you have to press buttons on my inverter.

I have a 12 kWh which can certainly do several hours. It does frustrate me a bit that the much larger battery in my car isnt available for this purpose. I know a few manufacturers are doing this, and it seems very sensible. Although maybe a bit niche in terms of how much of the right compatible tech you have to buy.

Likely a dumb question, but would use of a car battery for day to day storage reduce the long term life of the battery? I'm assuming that it would have a lot more charge/discharge cycles than typical use for private transport.

Fair question, and I dont know the answer. The discharge would probably be more "gentle" than in car use, and they are good for a lot of cycles nowadays, but reasonable concern.

[IvanV]

Likely a dumb question, but would use of a car battery for day to day storage reduce the long term life of the battery? I'm assuming that it would have a lot more charge/discharge cycles than typical use for private transport.

Not at all, it's a very intelligent question. And by chance, it is one of the questions I have been looking at recently as part of a wider V2G/X project. It is a survey project, not primary research. V2G is the acronym for "vehicle to grid" for the idea of using car batteries as temporary storage which can send power back to the grid when that is useful. V2X is the acronym for "vehicle to everything" which includes the notion of communications, which includes both V2G and smart charging - where the car charging is potentially delayed to avoid taking power when that would be inconvenient for the grid - but recognising you still want it charged for 7am or whatever.

First, we should understand that in a typical situation you need extra equipment to be able to use the car battery in this way. There is such a thing as an AC car, (and I'm not talking about AC Cars) where this equipment is onboard the car, so that the car can input and output AC. Because AC output is what you want to be able to use the electricity in the house or back to the grid. You can't just run the DC current from the battery back through a normal car charger and expect AC to come out the other end. Because such transactions are not reversible. You have to actively put an inverter within the car charger to be able to receive DC back from the battery and feed it into the house or grid. So, in the typical situation, for a normal DC car, you need a special V2G car charger which provides for V2G. And then you will probably need a lot of comms and algorithms, as probably the actual transactions that take place need to be based on the grid situation, and other factors like when you need the car, to determine what happens when.

It turns out that the answer to your question is, it depends. V2G/X can actually be used to extend the life of your battery. Because naive charging behaviour isn't actually best for the battery either. So if you set out entirely to maximise what you might earn from a V2G programme, that might well shorten the life of your battery. But if you set it up for optimal battery management, then you can earn some money and extend the life of your battery. And probably there is some kind of intermediate compromise that does reasonably well for your battery and increases what you can earn from V2G.

There have been a number of trials of V2G. What you conclude from it depends upon what price parameters have been set, and what kind of grid benefits the V2G provider can seek to earn. In one major trial, what the customer saved through V2G was only about a 20% improvement on what they would save through just smart charging - when grid conditions are used to determine which part of the night is the best time to deliver the amount of charge you need. When I read that, my reaction was, why should I do V2G for the small additional gain, when that cycles my battery more and potentially reduces its life. I was thus very interested to learn that there was an even better management program that actually improved battery life.

So V2G is looking rather more promising than I thought - I had tended to think it rather compromised precisely because of the thought raised by your question.

The missing piece in V2G, what could make V2G really useful, is responding to local distribution conditions, rather than to broader grid conditions. Mostly these programmes only consider the broader grid conditions, though not exclusively. Sometimes it has been possible - at least in some other countries, to take local distribution conditions into account. Though the value of doing so depends on you local distribution network, if it is very oversized then there is no benefit. But using V2G to avoid local distribution overloads - which also greatly increases grid loss because of the I²R loss factor - can potentially be a major source of value, as it avoids or delays proportionately very expensive local grid upgrade requirements. We don't have any kind of a system to reward small-scale providers for that value atmo in Britain, or direct their discharges for that reason.

Maybe when the project is over and if the client publishes the report, I should be able to give a link to it.

[Grumble]

Thanks for the Ripple referral bonuses those who used my link. First payment on my bill now. Let’s hope we all get some better prices in a few months time.

[lpm]

Ooh, lovely, the wind is now sending us money.

[Sciolus]

My county authority has just publicised a scheme called Solar Together, where you facilitate a collective procurement of solar panels by a number of houses in the county. They will then put that to tender for a single company to (have an option to) fit solar panels to everyone on the scheme, in the hope that it will drive down the cost of it.

Since it is no obligation, and a lot less effort than running my own competitive tending process, I thought I may as well sign up. Anyone else come across something similar in their own area?

Has anyone gone with them? I know they are project managers rather than installers, but I'm interested to see what the experience was like.

Anyway, they are currently in my area again, so I've registered my interest. They estimate that I would generate nearly twice as much electricity as I use over the course of a year (I'm a fairly thrifty consumer), so given stingy export payments I'm not sure that the business case is great.

[IvanV]

My county authority has just publicised a scheme called Solar Together, where you facilitate a collective procurement of solar panels by a number of houses in the county. They will then put that to tender for a single company to (have an option to) fit solar panels to everyone on the scheme, in the hope that it will drive down the cost of it.

Since it is no obligation, and a lot less effort than running my own competitive tending process, I thought I may as well sign up. Anyone else come across something similar in their own area?

Has anyone gone with them? I know they are project managers rather than installers, but I'm interested to see what the experience was like.

Anyway, they are currently in my area again, so I've registered my interest. They estimate that I would generate nearly twice as much electricity as I use over the course of a year (I'm a fairly thrifty consumer), so given stingy export payments I'm not sure that the business case is great.

It was a terrible experience. But that was because the installers selected by tender by Solar Together just had very little installation experience, and were basically using this contract to learn the business. Maybe they do it perfectly well now.

First they used satellite photos to get a general idea of what would fit on my roof, and then they sent in a surveyor. I tried to discuss with the surveyor where the equipment would go. He wouldn't say, but he took a lot of pictures of an undereave cupboard. So I guessed it would go there, though in fact the real reason he was taking an interest was cable runs. As far as I could see from the dimensions of the equipment it would fit. So I wrote to them, saying, I am assuming it will go there. They didn't respond. So I wrote to them, saying, if the fitters turn up not knowing where the equipment will go, that could be a disaster. They were very difficult to communicate with, and the people who communicated with you sounded like young kids with no technical knowledge.

Then they wrote to me, very belatedly, saying, we have now worked out that 6 of your 10 panels would need optimisers, because of the non-correlated shade they will get. It turns out that if you shade one panel in a run wired in series, it is like shading all of them, because they are in series and the shaded panel increases the resistance. But some clever electronics can overcome this. But it costs £75 for each optimiser, then there is fitting. So that was an extra few hundred pounds for the optimisers and the fitting. Mine were split into two runs, and the other 4 had better correlation in their shading. This is an issue not many people who are thinking about solar panels are aware of. This is something the original survey should have picked up, but at least they noticed in the end, even if it added a material amount to the price.

Then the fitters turned up, me still none the wiser about where the equipment would go. And the fitter said, yeah, they do that. We turn up and negotiate on the spot where the equipment would go. Basically we have to do that in a few minutes, or there won't be enough time to do the job. Quite a lot of people tell us to piss off at this point, and he quite understood. It couldn't go in that cupboard under the eaves, because it didn't have the necessary clearances. So we started looking for somewhere else, where the batteries could be within about a meter of the inverter. Anyway, we worked out somewhere we could do it, in the 10 minutes available, which was in the study. In fact, in retrospect, they could have gone in the porch, but in the 10 mins no one thought of that. But then my wife came home and had a wobbly. And the inverter made noises, gave off lots of heat, etc. It was now too complicated to move it all to the porch, the practical solution was an external cabinet on the wall of the study. So then we had to pay for an expensive external electrical equipment cabinet and relocate the equipment to the other side of the wall.

And then the fitter left, and in the next 36 hours I consumed 50kWh from the grid and exported 45kWh. It was costing me money to have the system. So I turned it off and phoned up the fitter, who fortunately had left me his phone number. The fitter had set the inverter with the wrong direction setting, which was in some hidden menu that I could only access with an undocumented procedure I hadn't been told about, and I couldn't understand these technical menus anyway, even with the manual.

And then less than 6 months later, it stopped working. I found a technical notice on the battery company's website, 2 years old, that when their batteries are used with my specific inverter, you have to use a different communications cable, which they supply in the fitting pack, or it tends to work for a few weeks or months and then stop working... In fact I phoned the battery company up, as they had a very helpful helpdesk. He told me how to check the pin settings on the cable, and so confirm I had the wrong cable. Since that fitting company was using those specific batteries with that specific inverter, you would think they would be aware of that issue. And get it right. Or have already had plenty of other customers where it had stopped working and know they would have to replace the comms cable.

By chance in the few months after the solar panels were installed, we had several power cuts. I thought we would be OK in a power cut. But we weren't. The system turns off in a power cut. Because if it didn't, I would be exporting my electricity to my neighbours, and risking power workers getting electric shocks. There are systems to avoid this, so you can use your batteries and panels in your house in a power cut, but it's expensive. It involves quite a lot of wiring. I looked into it, and it wasn't worth the bother. Another thing they don't often tell you.

But, after all that, it is working fine. And probably having the equipment in an external cabinet, rather than filling a large volume in the porch, might well have been a better solution, even though that cost me about £1600 extra. Though that location might be where you would put a heat pump one day...

I was interviewed by Solar Together about my experience with the installer. They told me that the installer has now learned it has to work out a fitment location for the equipment with the householder before the fitter turns up. And all the other things that went wrong with mine.

As far as I can see, from some other people who have had fittings with commercial companies, I didn't save any money.

[IvanV]

There is another issue actually, which I have learned about since, which is relevant to me and no one told me about at the time.

6 of my panels are on a flat roof, which is felt with gravel. It would need refelting within the life of the panels. So there was a decision from me whether to go ahead, given I knew that would happen. I did get enough engagement from the installer - but it it took a lot of asking - to learn that the panels sit in a sloping holder and just rest on the roof, held down by a bag of ballast inside the holder. The holders are held in place relative to each other by being attacked to some metal rails that rest under them. So it is relatively straightforward to take them off to refelt the roof. You unplug the panels, take them out of the holders, detach the holders from the rails. And then reverse the process to reinstall.

In fact, I decided that, in principle, the unplugging and very limited dismantling and reassembling is simple enough that a well informed layman could do it. But when the panels arrived to be installed, then I discovered how heavy the panels are. I definitely could not take those off the flat roof myself. So, when the roof is refelted, we would need a solar panel fitter to do the take them down and reinstall.

But what they don't tell you, is that when such a fitter takes off and returns the panels to the roof, they need to comply with the latest regulations, as it is in effect an installation. So, for example, about a year after mine was done, a no-batteries-in-lofts regulation came in. Good thing my batteries are not in that undereave cupboard, which would probably count as a loft for those purposes. But a friend of mine had his installation about 2 weeks before that regulation came in, and he had the batteries in a loft, unaware that within a couple of weeks they wouldn't be allowed to do that any more. Fortunately none of his panels are on a flat roof that would need refelting within the life of the panels.

[Sciolus]

But apart from that, you didn't have any problems?

Thanks, that's all worth knowing. There are clearly still a lot of risks and pitfalls. It's partly to be expected when you're trying to ramp up an entire industry from scratch in a couple of years, but we really shouldn't still be at the early adopter stage after more than a million installations (dunno how many retrofits). As I say, I'm doubtful about whether it makes economic sense for me, but it gives me a few questions to ask.

[Grumble]

The main lesson I’m taking from that is that it’s better to go with a company that’s been through it a good few times, or at least have experienced installers and surveyors. Speaking as someone who manages contractors a fair bit you also need to be able to stop jobs if something is going wrong.

[dyqik]

The main lesson I'm taking from this is that the UK is doing everything possible to make installing solar panels a massive liability.

[IvanV]

The main lesson I'm taking from this is that the UK is doing everything possible to make installing solar panels a massive liability.

Yes, that's how we do things in this country.

[rant]It is all designed to make a nice business for the builders and installers, and sod the householder, who experiences the risk. External cladding. Spray foam loft insulation. These are the well known current ones. But there are lots more. Blocks of flats with ancient common heating systems, that need replacing. Sash windows in conservation areas/listed buildings - which landlords put secondary double glazing behind, leaving people with no opening windows and inadequate ventilation.

I, and doubtless most other people with the same common arrangements as me, suffered with some new rules on boiler flues when your boiler is in an interior location in the building. They came in shortly after I fitted a new boiler - but were not even in contemplation until just after I had it fitted. That problem was because the gas-fitting industry was allowed to write the rules itself, and bugger the householders. And so, although it said, it was not the intention of these rules to force people to replace their boilers, eventually it had that effect, because the gas-fitting industry had no interest in writing the rules so that was true. So I was eventually forced, by gas-fitters refusing to maintain my boiler-which-needed-regular-maintainance-or-it-stopped-working, to replace my boiler, and put it in a different location in the house, with quite a lot of residual life still in my boiler.

With solar panels, we have already seen the recently arrived rules on not putting batteries in lofts, which potentially condemn householders who did that obvious thing. But doubtless other things will be learned which condemn other fitments. In the Netherlands, there was a terrible fire, which was terrible because a row of newly built terraced houses had designed-in solar panels fitted along the whole roof without any gaps between the panels. This caused the fire to be encouraged to travel rapidly along the terrace, confined under the panels, and so burnt the whole terrace down before the fire service could stop it. Typically fire containment systems are required which would keep a fire contained within one dwelling for long enough for the fire service to extinguish it and stop it spreading (much) further. But the arrangement of the solar panels buggered that up. Doubtless some rules will eventually come in, and doubtless the British version will pass the risk to the householder.[/rant]

[TopBadger]

With solar panels, we have already seen the recently arrived rules on not putting batteries in lofts, which potentially condemn householders who did that obvious thing.

Does it condemn householders? I didn't think it was often the case that newer rules were introduced as retrospective and rendered all previous installations invalid.

You'd expect installers to have to write to all their previous customers where they installed a battery in one of these places and let them know, and that hasn't happened to me yet.

[nekomatic]

Does it condemn householders? I didn't think it was often the case that newer rules were introduced as retrospective and rendered all previous installations invalid.

As Ivan mentioned, what can happen is that some maintenance or modification to an existing installation means it now has to comply with the same rules as a new installation.

What I’m getting from reading all this is that it’s much safer to buy into a scheme where someone else installs and operates the panels somewhere else, and you just get the return (and the cosy warm glow of doing your bit for decarbonisation).

[Grumble]

The risk is lower buying in to a co-op, you don’t get the benefits of being able to load-shift your usage to off-peak though.