We're going solar!

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kiwifidget

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#318426 16-Jan-2025 10:06

Himself has decided he wants solar power, not to reduce bills though that would be handy, but because he wants surety of supply.

The panels go up on Feb 4. Battery install and "go live" a bit later.

We have 3 phase power and apparently that's a small issue.

Himself wanted 50 panels and 3 batteries, but the sales guy talked him down to 40 and 1!

Pretty sure he'll get another battery eventually though.

I was surprised that I would still need UPSs for my tech stuff, but they only have to last for teeny tiny amounts of time instead of hours, so their lifespan just got extended.

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#3332131 16-Jan-2025 10:20

Is the 40 panels about 15kW in total?

I suspect that's why it was reduced, as the power company may have a limit of 5kW per phase when feeding back to the grid.
That's what happened to my sister when they got solar installed, they could get a max of 34 panels @ 440W.
They only got 10kW of battery and will be adding to that.

Not sure why they would reduce the batteries?!

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robjg63

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#3332185 16-Jan-2025 10:33

Nice!

Would make sense for every house to have this sort of setup one day, rather than having to try and build more backend power grid and generation.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

Dingbatt

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#3332189 16-Jan-2025 10:47

Awesome!

I look forward to your reports on the installation process and day to day use.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

networkn

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#3332259 16-Jan-2025 12:08

Do you feel confortable providing the name of your supplier and how you have found them to deal with?

We briefly investigated solar a few months back but I found every company that called me, to have a fairly slimey process. It put me off a lot.

kiwifidget

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#3332323 16-Jan-2025 14:10

After the catastrophe that was SolarZero we have gone with Harrisons.

Figure they are more likely to last the distance.

Sales guy seemed pretty good, not pushy obviously or we'd have 50 panels and 3 batteries, maybe more.

If we wait a couple of months there is supposed to be a better secondary battery available.

So we'll see how we go on one, but I'm sure we'll get the second later.

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RobDickinson

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#3332324 16-Jan-2025 14:13

Depends on the batteries, we can have power outages with the PW3 and not even notice when using computers etc.

How many batteries (and size) usually determines how long you can run for (kwh) AND how much you can run (kw)

~With 15kw of panels you may not keep 4 batteries topped up in winter and in summer you only need to cover your overnight use etc. There is a balacne here

kiwifidget

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#3339043 4-Feb-2025 11:49

The solarfication has begun!

Had the Sky dish and Freeview aerial relocated from the right to the left a couple of weeks ago. They were mounted on north facing roof space.

Today most of the panels are going up, the rest tomorrow. That's west facing roof.

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neb

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#3339112 4-Feb-2025 15:22

Are they still in the process of moving them into place? The spacing looks a bit irregular.

networkn

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#3339210 4-Feb-2025 17:34

neb:

Are they still in the process of moving them into place? The spacing looks a bit irregular.

NGL, I couldn't live with that arrangement

acsylaa

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#3339371 4-Feb-2025 23:40

I have just completed a 30x 440W bi facial and 16KW battery install at home, I did buy a pallet of panels and if i could cram another 10 on the roof they would be up there, so Himself saying he wants 50 panels im all for that!

I don't know why but all salesmen are a little scared of a 3phase system for some reason, they all seem to be a bit stand offish about them.

Ill be doing 40-50 at my parents place in the next 6 months and 2-3 battery's on a 3 phase system which will also be Victron and in the same setup as a USP/Self consumption.

For home I went with a Victron MultiPlus-II 48/5000/70-50 230V and a SmartSolar MPPT RS 450/200-MC4 also being Grid Tied.

With this configuration that I have installed, my solar setup/inverters are pretty much just a massive UPS With the ability to add more batterys. Batery being a SETL ENERGY 48v Lithium battery (LiFePO4) 51.2v 300Ah.

I have also just added another MultiPlus-II 48/5000/70-50 230V now bringing the system up to 10KW and converted the Whole house to run on the system, so now I have to re do my DG Application and re Inspect the second inverter, which is fine but now i have 10KW of inverter and 13.2KW of solar which the Whole house now Runs on.

I have set this sytem to Self consumption mode with battery SOC only ever getting to 40% meaning the battery will only Discharge to 40% at night time as you can see below in the graph, as this will give us some coverage should the power go out in the night.

With the 13.2KW on a average day the 16KW battery is fully charged by 11AM, and it will be interesting to see what winter is like as this only went live in November 2024.

SomeoneSomewhere

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#3339372 5-Feb-2025 00:14

I don't know why but all salesmen are a little scared of a 3phase system for some reason, they all seem to be a bit stand offish about them.

I think that's partly the issues described here. NZ is unusual in that if you're generating 6kW and consuming 5kW, you can still be billed for power usage if some of your phases were importing while others are exporting. There's ways to deal with this but none of them are good.

Jase2985

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#3339759 5-Feb-2025 20:03

@kiwifidget hows it been going?

kiwifidget

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#3339785 5-Feb-2025 21:28

OK, panel putter-uppering took 2 days, guys finished early this afternoon.

West facing roof over garage (14).

East facing roof over garage (16). Himself couldn't resist having a sticky-beak afterwards.

West (6) and north (6) facing roof.

42 panels, Douglas Adams would be proud.

Very impressed with the installers that Harrisons sent out. S4 Smart Electrical. No bad language, well none in English. Tidy, courteous, cleaned up after themselves. And worked from 8am to 5pm. very few breaks.

No battery installed yet, thats still coming, but we do have this thingy in the garage which ropes into the fuse board I think.

Because of our 3-phaseness the oven is not connected to the solar. I dont understand why, seems odd to me.

So we are still sucking off the national grid for now, but hopefully not much longer.

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CYaBro

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#3339801 6-Feb-2025 00:27

That Tesla box looks like the backup gateway which will allow your system to keep running if the grid goes down.

Are you getting a Tesla Powerwall 3?

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Jase2985

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#3339815 6-Feb-2025 08:14

How are you going to be using what I assume are Tesla batteries on the three-phase system as backup/storage?

From what I understand, you can only back up a single phase when the grid goes down, if you only have a single gateway. If you have 3 gateways, you still can't use any 3phase stuff in a blackout, as they won't be in sync.

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