Solar PV Installation

With the cost of electricity and other energy rising, and with the ambition of being a little more self sufficient, we decided it was time for a solar photovoltaic PV installation.

As we live slightly in the woods, and with a power line run that is very exposed to tree-fall, we tend to get one to two power cuts each year. Some of these outages have been as long as six or seven days. We’ve always had a small generator to run the freezers, water pumps and the oil boiler. However, it’s not big enough to run the whole property, and if the power cut were to happen, whilst we were away for a few days, then we’d have a lot of ruined food.

The first question was, what size system to install?

How Big?

We actually have quite a large power usage (for two people), due to multiple freezers, private water supply pumps and filtration and of course a fairly large home brewing operation. So the we worked out that we would require about 10kw of power to cover our peak usage.

Being big believers in resilience and redundancy, we opted to split our inverters into two parallel units of 5kw. This will allow a failure of one inverter, and still provide sufficient power whilst the broken one gets fixed. The brand of inverter we chose is Sunsynk. It’s not that this brand is the best by any means, but as far as value for money and features, they stack up pretty well.

Of course, to be self sufficient, you need to store the energy. So we chose Seplos self build battery kits. These are reliable and good value. The kits are mainly just cases with a battery management system (BMS), and the real beating heart of the battery actually comes from the quality of cells that you install into it. However, as far as the Seplos kit goes, the BMS is proven to be reliable and robust.

Storage

We have two batteries, both of 14.5kw capacity, which gives us around two days of normal electricity usage. We are looking at upping this to three, as being in northern Scotland, we certainly don’t see sun every day….

Panels

Finally, the solar panels. We have opted for an initial size of 6.6kw of panels. This will probably be added to, to give between ten to twelve kilowatts eventually. We’re using JA Solar panels, which offer a good balance of price and performance. To install these, we have built a purpose made shed to mount them on. We do have plenty of existing roof space, however, having spent years rebuilding and slating these roofs, we are not keen to start pulling slates back out to mount solar panels. Plus, we quite like the look of slate, and don’t really wish to be looking at panels instead.

Please have a read through the below articles on our solar PV installation.

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