Stopping the Export

We’ve just had a nice sunny weekend. The first one for a while and an early taste of Spring.

This meant that we beat our records as far as solar production is concerned with both days producing over 20kWh each. Unfortunately we gave far too much of it away on Saturday.

We weren’t really prepared for it so had force charged the battery overnight on cheap rate electricity. This meant that once the sun was up and the solar panels were generating there was nowhere to store the excess. We did send a little bit to the car for a while but Anna and I were out in the car most of the day at SY23. Once the car was gone, there was nowhere for the surplus energy to go other than back to the grid.

Saturdays performance
Saturdays performance

The yellow area is the power we exported to the grid for free. We don’t get paid for what we export so in some ways it was a waste.

We can of course look at it in another way. The surplus that we send back to the grid is of course green energy. It goes to the grid and will be used by our neighbours. The neighbours pay their electricity supplier in the normal fashion for it and don’t know that it’s come from our solar panels. So, although we didn’t get paid for it and the electricity companies did it’s not a complete loss as it does at least mean we are doing our bit for the planet. It’s better that our neighbours use our surplus than using energy produced by fossil fuels. The more people that are exporting surplus solar the better in the long term as far as the environment is concerned. In theory it should help the cost of energy as well but I doubt if it makes that much difference to that.

Dspite the fact that it helps the planet, we do intend to use as much of it as we can. We did much better on Sunday.

Sunday's performance
Sunday’s performance

For a start we stopped force charging the battery earlier in the day. This meant that we’d used up some of that stored energy by the time the sun came up and we were therefore able to send some surplus back to the battery for use later in the evening. The car was also there all day as well so once the battery was full and the sun was higher any surplus went to the car rather than being exported. The little bits that we did export were when the amount of surplus generation was less than the 1.4kw threshold needed to charge the car. We have however also ordered an Eddi energy diverter than will divert surplus solar power into our hot water tank. This starts up at a much lower threshold than the car so should mop up those little bits of surplus too.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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