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Hi Guys,

Lots of rummors around do these things atcually work.

Well here is a little U-Tube video i made ealier of a SOLiC 200 in action in my home today.

SOLiC 200 stops Electricity Meter Disk dead. - YouTube

I might be the company making the SOLiC 200, but i think a picture (in this case a Video) speaks 1000 words!

Enjoy watching an old style electric meter disk stopped dead in its tracks. :laugh3:
 
Watched it and it looks great, thought you might be the supplier though.

Are you aware that if your meter is running backwards though that you have a legal obligation to contact your energy provider?
 
Yes I am the manufacturer with my partner.

What you seeing is an R&D set up with the SOLiC 200.

And yes i have told the Electric company about the backward meter, so i guess they will change it in due course. :)

Thank you for the comment in the meantime.
 
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So are these things only for immersions or could they be used for other loads? I have a combi boiler so don't have an immersion and at the moment hardly use any if the power I produce, so, I was looking for a device which could monitor and then control something like electric heating or an air source heat pump. Will be keeping an eye on this post :)
 
Hi Steve, no pics yet?

From what i understand here that video showed an export of 1600W? Now if you put that into something like an immersion that was say 3KW it would get it warm, but not hot though, however a Heatpump needs a specific amount of power for it to work at all.

Think of it as a 12v light, put 2v in and it would be very dim, put 6v in and it would be brighter, put in the full 12v and there you go you can see with it now.
I know this should be watts not volts, but can you see the correlation?

There are not many items you can operate that will work on an amount of power that is less than they need, and because PV can have such a variable export what can you choose?

This is why people tend to use an immersion heater, you could use an oil filled heater too maybe, but when you are exporting the most you will not need the heater on.

I hope this helps.
 
Spot on Earthstore. Although in our experience even with very small loads the water gets hot in the Immersion tank, just takes a lot longer.

Remember every degree you raise it saves you heating it another way.

1600 was the generation amount not the export, you have to take the house existing electrical load to take off first, hence the sensor sits on the mains cable and measures when electricity is being exported.
 
Soz Kevin, have been flat out changing my MG engine ( never a dull moment! ). Have taken a few pics, will make some time and get them off to you.
How you've explained it makes sense now :)
 
No it's the slightly more modern ( 2004 ) MG TF. Is the old K series engine though. Lil project I picked up last October :)
 
Hi Steve, no pics yet?

From what i understand here that video showed an export of 1600W? Now if you put that into something like an immersion that was say 3KW it would get it warm, but not hot though, however a Heatpump needs a specific amount of power for it to work at all.

Think of it as a 12v light, put 2v in and it would be very dim, put 6v in and it would be brighter, put in the full 12v and there you go you can see with it now.
I know this should be watts not volts, but can you see the correlation?

There are not many items you can operate that will work on an amount of power that is less than they need, and because PV can have such a variable export what can you choose?

This is why people tend to use an immersion heater, you could use an oil filled heater too maybe, but when you are exporting the most you will not need the heater on.

I hope this helps.
watts is watts though, and it makes no odds whether you input 3kWh in a single hour or 2 hours, or 10 hours it will still provide the same level of heating capacity to the water in the tank (other than the thermal losses from the tank etc)
 
What is the best solar immersion controller out in the market does anyone know?????
i been reading about ABSwitch solar utiliser SU001 and the IMMERSUN but dont know which ones are the best to monitor the extra electricity your PV generates will be used in the house for heating your hot water and not using electricity off the grid.

Can anyone tell me please about this??????
 
Also is there an immersion controller that could monitor the electricity produce from the 4kw pv system to the house i.e how much is being used in the house together with monitoring how much is being used from the grid to your house.


Some one please tell me thank you.
 
What is the best solar immersion controller out in the market does anyone know?????
i been reading about ABSwitch solar utiliser SU001 and the IMMERSUN but dont know which ones are the best to monitor the extra electricity your PV generates will be used in the house for heating your hot water and not using electricity off the grid.

Can anyone tell me please about this??????

I know that this is an old thread, but I was looking for this sort of info 2 months ago, and I hope my experience will be helpful to other forum readers.

I'm not qualified to say which is the best in the market, but I have recently installed the ImmerSUN T1060 diverter and I'm very impressed. It seems well built, and unlike so many electrical fittings, it feels like it's been designed with one eye on the installer - eg adequate space for the incoming cables, options to come in from different angles, etc.
The display is more helpful than I had expected. It shows me how much power is being imported from the grid, or exported to the grid. Easy graphics (smiley face or grim face!) make it instantly obvious whether I'm in deficit or not, and how much power is being diverted to my immersion heater.
Since installation in late June 2017, I haven't had to use the gas boiler at all. Nil. Zero gas. Obviously, this is the period of highest solar gain and won't last all year.
My first full month used £11 worth of electricity (at grid pricing) to drive my immersion heater. On the one hand, that overstates the saving, as I wouldn't normally use an electric immersion heater. On the other hand, I'm a light user (single bloke, who splits living time between here and g/f's place) so a heavier user of hot water would have made greater use of surplus power. On a bright day, my immersion is always "sated" by midday.
I've turned the immersion thermostat up (almost) to the highest setting, so my hot water is REALLY hot. This means it easily lasts until the next morning for plenty of hot shower water. On the other hand, the thermostat setting for the boiler (on the Megaflow) is turned down quite low so that the boiler would clearly be the secondary source.

Other benefits: the digital display has been helpful in showing me when peak pv generation occurs. Surprised to see the dramatic difference between a very bright summer day with some cloud cover (maybe 1kw surplus) and when the cloud parts, that surplus immediately jumps to 3kw. It's also shown me that my microwave is less efficient than I had imagined, as I can see an instant drain of 1.5kw when it's switched on! This intangible benefit - of understanding how your solar panel generation is behaving throughout the day, and therefore when to use eg the washing machine - this benefit is much underrated. Incidentally, I've now plumbed my washing machine into the hot - making sure to use it when the water isn't scalding - so I'm now saving on that hot water heating bill too.
The unit is sufficiently versatile to allow another circuit to be powered once the primary (ie immersion heater) circuit has been satisfied. So if I want to install e.g. a storage battery, it would be possible.

The most difficult part of the installation was the simple but practical point of finding enough space within the consumer unit to fit the sensor clip around the inbound main "live" meter tail. (There is apparently a wireless sensor available if it has to be positioned in e.g. an outdoor meter cupboard.) Obviously, you need a dedicated circuit to the immersion heater.
I found a refurbed item on Ebay, and paid less than £200, so I'm well pleased.
 
we've got an iBoost fitted by www.nakedsolar.co.uk and we have found that we don't use any gas from when we turn the heating off in the spring until it's turned on again in the autumn. If we heat the water using the immersion heater on full blast it takes about 40mins to get up to temp, if we use the iBoost it has all day to do it and nearly always does, even found a full tank of hot water at 10:30am in Jaunary once.

4 people in the house, one 2 year old who has daily bath too. Just amazing!
 
Silverpete et al, I also recommend the Immersun. We've had one installed for over a year and it provides useful information. It would be even better if you could continuously download the data (PV generation is downloadable off an independent system). It is currently diverted to the DHW and the heat pump central heating reservoir (both served by the heat pump). Priority can be changed with the season. It recently gave a short circuit warning for the DHW immersion heater load (error 8) but on isolation everything checked out and the message has not been renewed on resetting the unit. This remains a mystery which I wish to fathom. Has anyone an experience of this error msg with no apparent cause? We do have a lot of outages in the region but it did not appear to coincide with one.
 

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