Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net wrote
Nope, not when you have a hot water cylinder that contains more than enough hot water for your daily needs.
And that?s the trivial way to avoid that problem.
Exactly. You'd really have to be careful.
Bill
I don't want to have to be worrying about that sort of thing all the time. It would be like going back 100 years. Maybe that's what the greenies expect of us. All the propaganda, softening up the kids, and knowing that those of us they can't fool will soon be dead.
Bill
So you drain your car and then at 4am someone has a heart attack. Brilliant.
Bill
Bloody cheek!
Bill
Irrelevant.
Bill
Only if the installation is still working at it initial performance when you sell the property and/or the green flavour of the month doesn't changed.
The problem here is the G99 inverter standard - G98 is up to 16A per phase, G99 is above that. If you want to fit a grid tied inverter (ie could feed back into the grid) you have to ask the DNO's permission if it's a G99 and they could say no.
However the solution is not to fit an enormous inverter for your electric shower, it's to run the shower off stored water that is heated earlier by your solar over as long as you have.
Then your G98 inverter can power the rest of your house at 16A from your battery. Yes when you fire up all the rings on your hob together it might take some grid power but the thermostats will soon kick in and throttle back the load.
The other way if you can't get G99 would be a changeover unit that disconnects the house from the mains and runs it entirely from your enormous inverter. But that doesn't really make sense unless you have a really good use case you can't handle another way.
Or you may be able to keep your enormous inverter in G98 mode with a CT to ensure it doesn't feed more than 16A into the grid.
Theo
Can't find the post now, but I'm still waiting to be told what the effectiveness of solar panels is in overcast conditions, compared to full sun.
I think Theo means the pump on a Power shower, an 1 kW one will be OK for prolly a hand held shower for a baby;!...
I said 1kWh. It's a 10.8kW shower, I'm using it on the lower 'eco' setting (because our low water pressure causes 'high' to be scalding hot). I can't find the rating of the 'eco' coil anywhere but let's guess 6.5kW. 1kWh at
6.5kW is 9.25 minutes, which sounds about right.Theo
The ROI could be anywhere between 8 to 12years if that's what you want to know
If you have an exposure meter you will know that its two stops up, or one quarter the light for a cloud in front of the sun. Deep overcast s
3-6 stops. i,e, from around 10% to sweet fanny adams.
The ArtStudent's qualitative response
5-10% as effective . At best.The Engineer's quantitative response.
I love people who agonise over hot water heating.
My ex late FIL installed solar water heating on the basis that it would 'cut his heating bills by 60%.'
The fine print in the brochure said it would cut his *hot water* bills by 60%, only.
He spent £3600 to save himself about £60 a year. And then they got covered in builders dust and stopped working altogether.
His total oil bill in a year in that house was around £3600. Solar panels lost him a year of oil for no benefit whatsoever.
I use oil to heat my Aga, and to heat a water tank for hot water. it runs about 20 minutes a day at 10kW to do the hot water.
120kWh per year, or around £50 a *year*.My central heating in winter chews up £50 a *day* if it's well below zero.
The design heat loss shows that worst case it can lose 10kw on a cold day and night - that's 240kWh per *day*.... and sometimes the 12kW boiler will run all night and nearly all day.
At minus 5°C outside with an interiors temperature of 17°C, that's a 22 degree heat difference., turning the thermostat down to 15°C might reduce heating by 10%. Big deal.
As I said ArtStudents? who can't count beyond ten without taking their socks off get ripped off all the time, by 'renewable' energy.
The ROI could well never happen, if personal experience is anything to go by. Solar water panels simply aren't worth it unless they are DIYed out of scrap
So all these folk here talking about using solar in on an overcast winter's day are, in fact, loonies?
This is correct, essentially. We use oil too for h/w and CH. In the summer, the oil dial scarcely moves over the period when the CH is off.
All the energy consumption at home is CH, to first order.
If this is the property that you built (had built) barely 20 years ago then you lost the plot completely insulation-wise.
Solar PV panels need full sun and their output drops precipitously otherwise, whereas the ones used to heat (or even warm) water also benefit from the non-visible wave lengths which cloud does not block out. Hence the reason why you can get sunburnt in the tropics when it is overcast.
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