Energy

In early December 2023 we decided to invest in solar panels for a number of reasons.

1) Cost of current energy
2) Our high usage
3) New electric car

We have quite high usage in our house for electricity and we have already swapped every light bulb for LED a few years back and slowly replaced items for more energy efficient ones but the main usage is Servers, Computers and several TV’s between us all. There is always someone in the house with a PC on 24 hours a day.

Our daily average week day was approx 18kW with the weekend at 23kW, as you can guess the costs were quite high and we were spending approx £175 a month just on electricity with a Scottish Power Fixed Tariff.

The energy crisis has put energy prices here in the UK at an expensive level £0.28p/kW, luckily were were on a good fixed rate energy tariff (£0.18p/kW) for 2 years of the crisis with Scottish Power but when this tariff ended in Oct 2023 we transitioned onto the standard variable rate of £0.28p/kW and it really bumped up the costs were were paying a month.

So in December 2023 we made the decision to get a solar power system and me being me, I wanted a good system that would supply the majority of our usage every day and thus really cut the monthly energy bills.

We got several companies to quote for a good system that would meet my needs, in the end we used Craig Michael Renewables of Telford to install a 14 panel (480w Eurener panels making 6.7kW our possible total solar generation), 2 Hanchu ESS batteries (9.4kW each making 18.8kW total capacity with option to install another at a later date), a Luxpower Hybrid inverter (with the integrated weather system) and a Zappi 7kW EV charger point.

The whole system was installed 26th January 2024 and the boys from Craig Michael Renewables were fantastic.

The Luxpower inverter does give you access to your energy stats via the Luxpower monitoring and reporting website.(Visit the demo station to see what data you can see) however I wanted a bit more control and the ability to play with the data on my websites. Luckily you can download the daily data in excel format which is great but not flexible, so to change this I wrote some python code to download the excel data files, convert them to csv format and then import it all into my MariaDB Database that is running on my home Apache Webserver.

I download these excel files every 15 minutes and import them so my data is only a max of 15 minutes out of sync

For the electric tariff we were advised by the installation company to go with Octopus Flux

With Octopus Flux you have defined set times and pricing for import and export of energy.

As you can see, it’s best to use energy from the grid only between the FLUX period of 2am to 5am as it’s the cheapest rates, we schedule most things for this time frame, in our case we charge the house batteries (capacity depends on the next day’s weather), charge our EV, set the dishwasher and washing machine etc. We most definitely do not want any energy from the grid during the PEAK times as it’s quite expensive.

As for exporting our energy it is best to try and schedule for the PEAK time frame as we get the best export prices then, else it is done during the day rate when the solar panels have an excess of energy and the house batteries are fully charged.

A month after the installation we decided to proceed and buy an EV now that we have a decent way of charging at home at a max of 7kWh with the Zappi.

After testing a several EV’s (VW id, Toyota, MG, Honda, Skoda etc) there was only one EV that I was really comfortable with and liked the look of and this was an MG4 (Trophy Long Range in Dynamic Red). A wonderful nippy and fast EV, such a pleasure and totally different driving experience and also very comfortable for my bad old back.

Octopus Flux Import

Octopus Flux Export