Our Solar Journey - The Beginning

We’re on the way. As of this morning we now have an order placed, a deposit paid, and a G99 DNO request submitted.

I looked at a few options for solar, but we ended up going with Heatable. Heatable work by being a “front end” to a network of installers who do the work on their behalf. You discuss options with them, decide on the system you want, they do the design, and they then monitor and guarantee the work done. It does work out a little more expensive than other suppliers, but from their YouTube channel and website, they seem to have a clue about what they’re doing and aren’t just “box shifting” kit to get it on people’s homes and get paid.

I’d been through said videos and did some research myself, but Heatable also schedule a design/consultation call to go through requirements, etc. This was actually quite useful, as the design in my head was somewhat “over-engineered” and got scaled back and simplified somewhat! From that, they provide 3 options with pricing and you simply pick the option you want, pay the deposit, and you’re started!

From the options we had, we ended up picking a system comprised of:

• 15 × 450W REA Power solar panels (450W each), with
• 15 × Enphase IQ8HC microinverters (380W each)

paired with

• 2 × Enphase IQ 5P Battery (5kWh each)

That’s spec’d to give us a 6.75kW solar system with 10kWh of attached battery storage. That’s estimated to give us a total estimated annual output of around 5,250 kWh (obviously depending on weather). While that’s more that our (current) estimated electricity usage, our generation isn’t going to align perfectly with our usage.

For one, we’ll generate more in the summer than winter, and more during daytime than nighttime; whereas our usage is likely to be skewed the other way, more usage over the winter and during the morning/evening. Hopefully the battery can help “correct” the day/night skew a little by charging in the day, and discharging at night, but we’ll also need to make good use of an export tariff to sell some of the excess daytime power to offset any we buy back at night.

One other advantage of the Enphase] hardware is that it has an out-of-the-box HomeAssistant Integration which should mean that both the solar and batteries will integrate nicely into my existing HA setup. It’s also a (mainly) local integration, with all of the communication taking place on the local LAN between HA and the Enphase Gateway (it does still require a once yearly connection to Enphase cloud to get an auth token however!). This should mean quicker and more reliable updates and control in HA as it’s nt doing a round-trip out to t’Internet and back (this is also one reason why I went with Enphase for the batteries as well as the inverters).

So… order is done, G99 is in, next stop is the site survey…

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Posted 4 March 2025

In SmartHome Solar Battery