FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Hi Guys and Gals, apologies if this is in the wrong section as I already have a system but I'm looking for advice to add to existing or put a new section in. let me explain.

I've 25 x 445 Astronergy (11kw) on my garage roof, south (SSW) facing but shallow angle 5 degrees.
We've 2 H1-5.0-E-G2 2 x 5kw inverter in parallel (I think, I'm not massively technical), so 10kw
16.6kw of batteries, 2 Masters and 2 Slaves at 4.15kw each (ECM/ECS4300).

We've a couple of ohme chargers and 2 and 1/2 electric cars (smart fortwo eq).

We have an export license for 8kw to the grid and use octopus at the moment.
We've just had the gas disconnected and intend using the solar and batteries for the heating, cooling and hot water.

We're just having some SYO (see you out) projects done on the house, rewired, underfloor heating, heat pump, air con and changing the profile of the roof plus a small extension.
This will give me the option of having another 14 solar panels on the new bit of roof, plus possibly and other 12 on the old bit. I'm thinking just the new bit for now, so another 6kw. The roof is SSW facing at 15 degrees.

I understand in the peak of the summer we'll have 17kw of solar, on the existing system we did have a little bit of clipping, from 11kw to 10kw, but not enough to worry about. We didn't put anything to the cars, we just exported after the batteries were full. For many months we used what was in the batteries through the day, supplemented with the solar - we had a gas boiler though for CH and hot water.

I'm thinking our electrical demand will be a lot higher, both summer and winter. The heat pump will be a 10kw output one, and were thinking of either a 5 or 7kw aircon (just 3 rooms). I'm expecting the surplus solar in the summer will go into making the home office a lot more comfortable through the day and a couple of the bedrooms on an evening.

Thats the thinking at the moment - very happy to hear other ideas.

thanks in anticipation, Simon,

If you are looking long term, and many panels... might be worth looking into the cost of 3-phase upgrade (though this could be silly money)

Just also note that the 10kW heat pump and the 7kW of AC usually refers to the HEAT/Cooling output usually, so you might find the real power use is much lower. Hopefully you are already aware of this.

If your needs do increase heavily, it might be worth looking into increasing battery capacity, but some ToU tariffs like Octopus Cosy, could be used for Winter time to keep the heat pump costs down. It can be worth doing your sums to check what tariff works depending on time of the year.

Home Assistant could be a good shout if you don't have some automation setup, as this could be used to better control how your systems work and interact with each other.