Pv's going up at Compost mansions

Well I think I have mentioned it in the past, but we have finally bitten the bullet and ordered the Pv's.

We are going to have 14, 185 w panels, Sharp NU 185 single crystal photovoltaic panels , each one consists of 48 monocrystalline cells, open circuit voltage 24 volts, with an SMA Sunny Boy 2500 inverter to tie it in to the mains electricity system. There will then be a total generation metre, to record what gets generated.

These will go on the back of the garage and workshop roof. Which rather conveniently faces 165 degrees, so SSE and will be a great site for them. We would reasonable expect to get around 850 KWhrs per Kw installed, so will be getting about 2200 KWHr a year of our own generated electricity.

Some of the tree felling in the winter was to clear shading trees, only a problem in the winter when the sun is low, but it all will help.

The system will be grid tied (off grid proved to be a bit problematical, with the batteries and the added complication)

So yesterday we did the first part of the install which was to lay armoured cable in a trench from the garage to the house. This involved Ken the Dig and his JCB, and a lot of shoveling and poking of Cat 5 cable inside a sheath to protect it in the trench.

We are doing the gravel drive completely in a few weeks as well, so the mess left behind after the trench was re filled in, doesn't matter for a few weeks and then Ken the Dig will come back and make it all lovely and level and weed free and beautiful ( after we have gone and bought a load of stone, geotextile and gravel)

Sp , all very exciting and I will use this thread to chronicle the events as they unfold....

That is so exciting. I look forward to following your progress.

Clearly I am going too slow in tooling up to do PV installations... there goes another customer. :?

I know it's a terribly 'unbritish' thing to ask, but I would be very interested to know about costs (equipment, installation, how long you expect it to pay for itsef...)

Hope to provide all info asked for, as I post about it!

Thanks! DD1 knew about pvs, as the Uni where she works is looking into installing them as part of their plan to be sustainable, which is quite impressive. (The place where I work is still trying to get people to turn lights off - we're not so advanced!)

Ok, so PV's now up so I will try to get around to posting up the last few days worth of pics, to document it all....

But its wonderful, simply terrific...

Compostwoman wrote:so will be getting about 2200 KWHr a year of our own generated electricity.

That sounds good! We use less than 5000 KWhr a year and falling due to loosing a teenager and gaining a Rayburn (good swap except Rayburn doesn't mow or strim). It would be interesting to see if it does work out.

The armed cable...don't you get a large loss at low voltage....I'm interested as we can install panels on the ground without planning permission but I would have to travel 10-12m with an armoured cable to the house. Do you have any info on that?

Zoe wrote:
We use less than 5000 KWhr a year and falling due to loosing a teenager and gaining a Rayburn (good swap except Rayburn doesn't mow or strim).

You have a teenager who mows and strims????? Fantastic!!

Today we generated 15 (ish) KWhrs

I WILL get the pictures and the blurb up soon, I promise!

Zoe the loss is about 1% over the 30 m cable we have in the ground.

Well so far since it was installed we have generated about £7 per day.

We have also reduced our consumption by more than half, and as we get better at matching our usage in the day time to use up what we have generated at the time, we will use less.

Obviously we are at the sunniest part of the year and this will not be the case in the winter, but even so...its great!


A rather nice picture I took which shows the woodstore roof , the pv's and the solar thermal.