Solar Power Winter Settings

 A couple of weeks ago I got an email from my solar power system installer, Greenscape Energy. I wish they'd told me this last year! (read about our installation journey here,  here , here and here).

As the weather gets colder I'd again started to get the problem I had last winter of, when the sun doesn't shine, the batteries get depleted and the Battery Management System shuts down, which means I have to restart it. Sometimes day after day!

This article attached to the email they sent me told me what the problem is and and what to do about it.

So I tried. But when I accessed the app for my inverter (from Solis), the options for setting the configuration weren't there.

I contacted Solis support and they told me the options had been removed in a recent app upgrade but that they could make changes for me. Well they tried but it didn't work. But then I found how to access the Advanced Settings on my inverter's control panel and managed to make the changes for myself.

In the process, I came across this article explaining how I could set my system up to recharge the batteries when energy costs are lower and then use that energy instead of taking power from the grid when prices were higher.

Yes! Just what I needed! I am on the Octopus Flux tariff for electricity...

So I could charge my batteries to capacity of 6.3 kWh at 16.76p / kWh and use it during the say when I would be paying 27.93p or even 39.1ip/ kWh.

But I had a problem. The time on my inverter was set to Shanghai time (the time zone of the manufacturer Solis) and every time I tried to reset it to my timezone it would revert a few minutes later.

Fortunately, the helpful people at Solis Europe support were able to fix this, so today I made the settings change on the inverter as described here...

..

...although in my case I set it to 2:30 to 4:30 to fit within the window of the cheap Octopus electricity. I look forward to seeing how it works. My back of the envelope calculation suggests it could save me over £200 a year in electricity costs. We will see. More anon.