My bro has this over-temp problem on Portugal - he covered the front of the tube array with Celotex. Mind you, he is only there in the winter (dunno how he’ll work the 90 days in 180), so the insulation stays in place for months on end. I’ve had a 30-tube full size array, with frame, for years - but haven’t got round to fitting it. I noticed the other day that one of the tubes has lost it’s black coating. No idea why - the others are perfect.
Would it not be possible to divert some of the overproduction in summer (as a couple of you are saying you have excess left over after your pools are heated) towards powering some of the newer air conditioners instead? The price of those seems to have come down remarkably even though they seem to need from 2000W (same as boiling a kettle used to use) to operate.
Has anyone come across a company called photovoltaic universe? they seem to come and go off Amazon.
For some reason I have the impression Germany is a good place to source good quality kit? would avoid customs problems now encountered with the UK.
We had panels fitted last August. It doesn’t pay to sell energy back to the grid at the moment, but self consumption is definitely worthwhile. Certainly here in the south it’s a good investment, if you’re not planning on moving any time soon.
Look into virtual battery tech, Urban Solar Energy in Lyon seem to be one of the market leaders. Let’s you “save” electricity you generate but don’t use for the night/another day but without having an actual battery. In effect they wind back your meter to the value generated but not consumed.
Looking at how it’s working out for us, I’d say break even will be achieved between 10 and 12 years in the future. But we now know solar panels last way longer than initially feared, so we’ll still be getting decent yield in 25 years.
In terms of looks, someone added panels during a roof renovation in the village here and they’re recessed, which does a great job. They’re much less noticeable.
1 Like
My plan is to use electric shutters to do the same although that is a plan b after putting excess into water tank and undetfloor. Could use a fan core unit for a laundry room maybe.
Hi Greg.
Do you use Urban Solar Energy? I have looked at their website and their virtual battery concept sounds interesting, but I was just wondering how it worked in the real world. Is it worthwhile?
To be honest, I haven’t found the energy (no pun intended) to do the ENEDIS paperwork, but I will go with them. A neighbour has, she’s happy so far. Took three months to get set up though!
Thanks. I guess the 3 months is the time to change from your current supplier to them.
No, it’s the time to register your panels with ENEDIS apparently.
When we had 4kw of panels installed on our roof, the company that did it took care of all the ENEDIS stuff. We had it all sorted in less than 4 weeks. In the first full year, we saved about €1200 in total. That included electricity sold, electricity we did not have to buy because of self consumption and a rebate on the cost of installation, payable over 5 years. We should be able to pay back the cost in less than 10 years.
In saying this however, it’s not always just about cost. I have also monitored how much CO2 we have saved. Although we run a large(ish) house with air conditioning and a hot tub, our house is better than carbon neutral.
Hi Ray,
Would you be able to share more details on this?
When we bought the house, it already had 1.5kw of solar panels, but they weren’t being used effectively by the previous owners. We made it up to 4.1kw and also added equipment that would allow us to monitor usage and also to divert excess power to hot water. I live in a modern ( 10 years old) house with an AA rating and a ground source heat pump for heating in the winter. I also have rev clim for cooling in the summer and heating in spring/autumn when it is more efficient that the GSHP. I take my energy consumption very seriously. When you have solar electric, by modifying your behaviour, you can maximise your self consumption and save both money and CO2 generation. It’s not really that hard. I’m not only carbon negative, I also made a profit of about €75 on my energy consumption in 2020. Not a huge amount really, but what do most people pay each year for energy ?
Hi Ray.
The system Greg suggested is a “virtual battery”. So if you install your own PV panels (which is significantly cheaper than having them installed professionally in order to get paid for excess production) you land up with the problem of being unable to sell your excess. The cheaper installation costs (about 2400 euros for a 3kW installation) allows payback to be achieved quicker. You can divert excess for hot water but this is another 250-300 euros for the diverter unit.
My understanding of the “virtual battery” is they allow your meter to run backwards so you get a credit for all excess production which you can use at night and if sufficient in the winter. There is a charge for setting up, a monthly charge and you have to pay for transport and taxes on the electricity which is recovered from the “virtual battery”. This appears to me to be the solution which requires the least upfront capital to use all your PV production. That is my understating of it at the moment.
I thought if you installed your own you were unable to tie into the grid at all???
Sounds really good @hairbear
Hi.
You have to tie to the grid otherwise your microinverters turn off automatically since they need to synchronise with the frequency of the grid. It is also to protect workers on the powerlines since they don’t want your PV panels making the lines live whilst working on them. So even if you have PV panels, if there is a electricity blackout you will not be able to generate electricity from your PV panels.
If you install your own, you will not be paid for excess electricity which you put onto the grid. But then you don’t have to pay the large sums to have the PV panels professionally installed in the first place.
1 Like
When I said “We made it up to 4.1kw”, I didn’t mean to imply that I installed them myself. I got an installer to do the work, and I sell just surplus with self consumption.
1 Like
yep this is what we are doing, we have water heating panels as well as PV ones, just need to find time to do it!
If it’s a straight hook-up to sell to EDF I think it’s much simpler, but those contracts are awful these days. Terrible rates and long lock-in, you’re much better off self-consuming or going for “virtual battery” tech unless you have a lot more generation capacity than I have (3kW).
EVEN SO, the company who installed ours quite openly said they don’t have time to do the paperwork for us, and COVID has put pay to fast turnarounds, period, for the moment. ENEDIS apparently has a backlog due to reduced personnel in offices, so everything is backed up.
USE themselves no longer help with the paperwork for the same reason as our fitters, it’s time-consuming and they struggle to charge much for it - they’d rather focus on other things, so they pass you to a “partner” who will do it for you. But having looked at the ENEDIS forms I decided the “partner” is an unnecessary middle-man and probably part of the cause for the delay my friend had. (She gives documents to partner who hand them to ENEDIS, who come back with a question, which the partner has to relay, etc. Better just deal with ENEDIS directly!)
In any case, I doubt you’d get a 4 week turnaround on anything at the moment, even if your fitters were prepared to do the ENEDIS hook up and you went with the simplest option of just selling your juice back to EDF. More’s the pity.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to do it, but one needs to be realistic about the current lead times. 
OH. I think some of these points need clarification, as there’s hooking up to the grid and there’s hooking up to the grid! 
So of course, as @hairbear said, the fitters will hook you up to the grid to GIVE energy you don’t use back to ENEDIS. You don’t get paid for this, so like him, we make sure we use as much of our power as we can (pool pump runs during the day, if it’s nice and sunny the car is charging, water heats around lunchtime, etc.) But any extra just goes back to ENEDIS gratis. But for sure, that hook up was handled by the fitters and was relatively speedy, it’s normally just a form (unless ENEDIS decide to audit your fitter - happens about one time in ten, according to our guy, unless they found something on their last audit, then they’ll probably check more carefully for a few years).
The connection I’m talking about above is to SELL your energy. Whether you sell to EDF, someone else, or use “virtual battery” tech, it’s really “selling” your generation, so you have to go through the administrative hoops to be registered as an energy producer. And that’s the bit that took 3 months for my friend, thanks to a mix of COVID, comms and just general slowness.
This is distinct and separate from being connected to the grid.
Then there’s @PeterE’s point, that indeed if you are in a situation where you just can’t consume all your solar energy then “virtual battery” is a great way to not lose it with a relatively low up-front cost - just some frais de dossier and everything else is calculated monthly with your electricity bill. The “stockage” fee is very modest, USE - by way of an example - make their money as energy brokers, the “virtual battery” and surrounding tech is simply how they measure “their” energy so they can sell it on the electricity exchange. It’s very clever really.
So to sum up:
- fitters will (I would’ve thought ALWAYS) hook your panels to the grid
- there’s a whole separate registration process to SELL energy, which is a bit lengthy but you have to do it if you want a “virtual battery”
As an aside, if someone insisted on self-installing (I don’t know why you’d bother, as fitters don’t charge much anyway - it’s only a couple of days’ work) you’d need to know a friendly electrician who would come and check what you’ve done and be prepared to have it audited by ENEDIS on their ticket. I do know someone who did this, he’s the lead technician at a large campsite, he’s not a registered electrician but he really knows what he’s doing and the electrician who comes to inspect the work his team does at the campsite was happy to extend the same service to his house. But this is of course unusual. Most times an electrician will tell you to take a long walk into the sea if you asked them to inspect your work. 
1 Like
I do get paid for the surplus generated electricity left over after I have self consumed whatever I possibly can. It’s not a huge rate, but it’s better than giving it away.
Ah, OK. We were advised against because of the contract length and the poor rate, coupled with the rapidly changing market. Our fitters said in their opinion “wait and see” is the best plan, so we followed their advice - hence the virtual battery instead which, as @PeterE said, is akin to winding back your meter, and you’re not locked in if something better comes along.