(upbeat electronic music)
- Welcome to Episode 21 of PVTV,
where we talk all things solar.
On today's episode, I wish
Ross a Merry Christmas.
- Merry Christmas to you too.
(laughs)
- And we're also gonna
review a solar installation,
actually a solar and battery installation,
from start to finish, by yours truly.
And then, we're gonna
have a look at the impact
this solar system has had
on our customers' electricity bills,
over the last couple of months.
And see whether it's paying for itself,
or it's not paying for itself.
And whether solar and batteries
might be something worthwhile.
- So we're just gonna open up the LG Chem,
this is an LG Chem solar battery,
10 kilowatt hours,
and high voltage.
So, this particular model's compatible
with the Sunny Storage,
which we'll be using,
to link up to the solar
system, the Sunny Boy.
And communicate all together
as one cohesive unit.
It means you can see
the battery in the app,
and it means you can see
the solar in the app.
You can also see how much power
the house is using at the same time.
Which is a really powerful tool
when managing your energy usage.
So you've got your wall
mounting bracket here.
Your manual, which is gonna
give us our clearances
and how much ventilation space around it
that the battery needs.
This is your wall mount bracket,
for the LG Chem High Voltage.
And if we pull this up here.
There she is.
Absolute beauty.
This ones actually comes with a hair.
That hair's probably come
all the way from Korea.
But yeah, there she is.
(upbeat electronic music)
- So we've just done some measurements.
Turns out the height here
is not gonna be enough to have
the battery and the battery
on top of it.
The air-flow goes from top to bottom.
The estimate each storage,
one's about 700 underneath,
and the LG Chem needs
about 600 mil underneath.
So there's just not enough space here
to put it.
So we've decided we'll
put the battery here
and the Sunny Boy storage here.
Or vice versa, either one will work.
(upbeat electronic music)
- So this battery is now mounted,
(with great difficulty)
it's now on the wall.
And we just put some cables in.
So we've got a 4mm2 DC cables,
very important.
An earth cable as well and another CAT5
communications cable.
Which will keep our communication with
the Sunny Boy storage.
And that's the way the storage can tell
the battery where to discharge or charge.
- We'll just hook them all up now,
and almost done.
(upbeat electronic music)
- So what we're doing is just fitting off
the battery here
we've got our DC cables, boot
laces on the end of the cables
You can just push them
straight in. Earth as well.
- [Sam] I can see your battle
wound from lifting the battery
- And then the CAT5 can be
a little bit tricky.
But what you basically wanna do
is just strip a little bit off
the CAT5 there.
And remember your colour
combinations here.
You basically just push that in there,
push it screw driver in, and push it in.
And pull the screw driver out
and it will be tight in there.
Just do that for all of them.
Remember,
just give them a little tug to make
sure they are in there tight.
And then they will match up with
these here and we will remember that
for when we fit up the battery.
Because that's how
the communications will work.
And then once we're done
we will
plug these into each other.
But we won't do that until we're finished.
We aren't turning them on,
so leave them out for now.
Cause if you leave them plugged in
the battery will drain itself.
(space music)
- And that's a solar battery installation.
- Cool
- Good work Ross.
- Thank you.
- Now we've seen what the actual
installation looks like with the solar.
Six kilowatts?
- 6.6 kilowatts solar.
- Which will generate on average,
in our state of Victoria,
about 24, 25 kilowatts a day.
- Yeah
- On an average day, alot more in summer
and less in winter.
Now I'm sure everyone's curious to hear
about how this is actually impacting
Serge's electricity bills,
and the difference it's
making to his home.
So maybe Ross, you could show us,
after doing such and awesome install.
What it's actually doing in real life
and in practicality for Serge.
- Yeah.
So when it gets set up
you basically get set up with
an online monitoring portal.
With SMA you get Sunny portal.
So the first screen you get here is just
the dashboard which shows you
a real time reading of how much
power you're using, and where that power
is coming from.
So as of right now the
house is drawing 368 watts.
And it's all coming from the battery.
So zero consumption from the grid
at the moment.
And if we go to in the option here
we can actually see.
So this window here shows that
the battery is discharging.
And the consumption's 360 watts
and nothing is coming from the grid.
So that's in real time,
and that's what Serge can look at,
at any stage and see how much battery
charge he's got.
And you see about 90% left here.
So it's actually 9:20PM at the moment
and he's still got 90%
left in the battery.
So that's doing pretty good.
So what you can also have a look at
is the energy balance.
This is the snapshot of how much,
where you're power is coming from
and how it's being
distributed in the house.
So this is from today.
So it's the 19th of December.
I'll go back a week, so to the 12th.
If we have a look at this we can see
the bottom graph here is solar generation.
So this day probably wasn't a great day
in terms of sunlight.
But we can see that
this dark orange section
in here is where the battery was charging
by approximately 11:00
AM it was fully charged.
And the system was actually
exporting to the grid
for the rest of the day.
While it was also taking
care of his usage.
- Exporting means that the solar system
is generating more power than not only
the home needs but than
the batteries needs as well.
The battery is fully charged.
The homes' needs are
supplied and there's extra.
So the solar system is actually
selling that extra power back to
the power lines for a nominal rate.
- [Ross] And the battery
is charging really fast.
So it's charging by that 11 or 12 o'clock
in the morning, but as you can see
on the consumption
- [Sam] The orange part is the part where
it's charging.
- [Ross] Yeah, the dark
orange, so the bottom part.
The light orange is where the battery
is actually discharging.
- [Host] So that's just
the graph above that one?
- [Ross] Yeah, so you got your
consumption graph on the top,
and your generation graph on the bottom.
Now when your drawing power from the grid
your consumption graph will go red.
As you can see there is absolutely
no red on this graph at all.
Which means we're not drawing
- [Sam] The home is fully self sufficient.
- [Ross] Exactly.
So it's charging really fast,
by approximately 10 AM it's fully charged.
And then it's exporting all day.
And then it's actually getting Serge
through the whole night, which is all
the sections here.
It'll go to the next day, and the morning,
and it's also taking care of that morning
spike of power as well.
So the battery is getting through
the base load of the night.
And then in the morning everything
sort of turns on and it's
taking care of that as well.
Then the solar starts
to kick on and starts
to charge the battery again.
- Yeah, so we're saying that the home
is on these days, 100
percent self sufficient.
- Yep.
- So since having a
solar battery this home
is virtually drawing nothing
from the power lines.
And it's actually set up in such a way
that if there's a black out the home
can run entirely self sufficiently from
the battery, even when the home or the
neighbourhood is in a blackout.
Which is really cool technology.
Now I'm curious, are these just really
good days Ross?
I know we are in summer at the moment
and we have been for the
last couple of months
so Serge is 100 percent self sufficient.
Do we have examples of what a bad day
might look like for this solar system?
- Well I'll put the
month's back a little bit.
So September is when we
put it in, September 5th.
So I'll go to sort of, it hasn't been,
it's really only started
getting sunny recently,
so we'll go back to September.
And look for some, I can't actually find
a bad day.
But even on the bad days,
I think the point is.
It doesn't take much solar for these
batteries to charge up.
So most days, every single day I'm looking
at here the battery is, when it can,
the SMA inverter will pump so much power
into the battery so fast that within
two or three hours it's fully charged.
And then it's lasting, most of the time,
all through the night and
all through the morning.
So if you have a look
at this example again.
You can see the sunlight's sort of going
up and down as a normal
cloudy day probably.
But just that little bit of morning
sunlight is just absolutely hammering
the battery and it's
just charging super fast.
- [Sam] Yeah, this is important because
you can see how huge that block of
yellow generation is.
And this is something I think a lot
of people don't realise.
When it comes to modern solar systems,
is that for most family homes
your average size solar system
of say five kilowatts.
Is gonna generate far more power
than you're gonna need during the day.
So people still get electricity bills
because when night time comes around,
event though they've made heaps
of solar power during the day,
they're switching over to the grid
at night time and generating
an electricity bill.
So this is a great example.
You can see how much solar power
the home's actually generating
and how quickly it can actually charge
a solar battery to mean you're fully
self sufficient at night time.
- Yeah.
And if we finally go to the uh,
we'll just to to the uh,
the total graph.
So this will give us the total.
Since this system has been installed,
where our power came from.
We can see that we consumed
1,219 kilowatt hours.
44 of those came from the grid.
- [Sam] So say that again.
- Of the 1,219 kilowatt hours
that Serge used, since we installed it,
only 44 came from the grid.
- What's that as a percentage?
- Quick maths in my head.
- I'm just teasing.
- But it is actually three percent.
- Three percent
So Serge has got solar, which is a
6.6 kilowatt system.
Actually an average size
solar system these days.
He's got a 10 kilowatt hour LG Chem
solar battery, with an SMA solar inverter.
And he's 97% self sufficient .
- And to add to that.
He exported fifteen hundred
kilowatt hours.
- Which you get paid for.
- Which you get paid for.
- So that means the 3% that he had to pay
the power lines for, they are actually
gonna pay him for how much?
- Fifteen hours kilowatts worth.
- And it's usually about what, 10 cents?
- Yeah, about 10 cents.
- Per kilowatt.
So Serg is in profit.
Is that right, is he in profit?
- Yeah, cause he only paid
for 44 kilowatt hours.
And got he got credited fifteen hundred.
- Yeah it's a big difference.
- Yeah, huge difference.
So, that export will well
and truly be covering
the small amount of grid
usage that he's used.
- And this isn't a huge solar system.
Again, 6.6 is an average
size solar system.
10 kilowatt hours is your average size
solar battery.
So this isn't anything crazy .
And this is a family home we're talking
about as well.
- Yeah, exactly, yeah.
- There's quite a few
people living in this house.
Fully self sufficient in suburbia.
Fully covered if there is a blackout.
It can run the home 97% self sufficiently
in zombie apocalypse and that's really
cool technology.
That this is at our fingertips now
and this is something that is available
to everyone.
It's exciting.
- Amazing.
- So four months Serge has had his system,
97% self sufficient.
You did a pretty bloody neat install.
- I did, yeah.
- Am I allowed to say bloody on YouTube?
- We'll bleep it out.
- (laughs) That's it.
So thanks for watching guys.
That's been Episode 21.
Is there anything else
you'd like to add Ross?
- No, not really, that covers it.
- Well good.
Merry Christmas guys, trust
that you've all been well
and see you in the new year.
