Hi - hoping someone can help with the question below, thanks in advance for your time.
We're looking at an installation before the FIT goes away, and discussing our needs with a couple of installers.
The complication - we're in an old farmhouse with 3 phase supply. One phase is tapped off for the house - and it's from this phase that all our consumption comes. The other two phases aren't used at all, although there's a (old) single meter across all phases before the house phase is separated.
We've looked at two options. (1) Install a single phase 4kw array and attach to the phase used for the house. (2) Install a 3 phase 10.5k array to benefit from the higher export / generation credits given that this is still allowed under G83.
What's not clear to me - assuming we go for the larger option, how can this be configured / connected such that aside from the FIT tariff, the total generated energy is offsetting our consumption, which is on the single phase.
It may be as simple as "the meter will automatically reflect this as it looks at total net consumption" - but my concern is that we go ahead and then discover that actually we're only getting a third of the estimated savings because the generated power on the other two phases doesn't 'offset' the consumption on the phase.
This didn't feel like a unique situation - from google I saw a couple of similar questions on this site asked a few years ago, but with no clear answer. I wondered whether there is a solution / standard approach.
Many thanks in advance.
We're looking at an installation before the FIT goes away, and discussing our needs with a couple of installers.
The complication - we're in an old farmhouse with 3 phase supply. One phase is tapped off for the house - and it's from this phase that all our consumption comes. The other two phases aren't used at all, although there's a (old) single meter across all phases before the house phase is separated.
We've looked at two options. (1) Install a single phase 4kw array and attach to the phase used for the house. (2) Install a 3 phase 10.5k array to benefit from the higher export / generation credits given that this is still allowed under G83.
What's not clear to me - assuming we go for the larger option, how can this be configured / connected such that aside from the FIT tariff, the total generated energy is offsetting our consumption, which is on the single phase.
It may be as simple as "the meter will automatically reflect this as it looks at total net consumption" - but my concern is that we go ahead and then discover that actually we're only getting a third of the estimated savings because the generated power on the other two phases doesn't 'offset' the consumption on the phase.
This didn't feel like a unique situation - from google I saw a couple of similar questions on this site asked a few years ago, but with no clear answer. I wondered whether there is a solution / standard approach.
Many thanks in advance.