New system going in soon

[Captainpugwash]

Hi this is my first post on here.

I am having a new solar system installed in about 10 days time.

A 5,670 kW solar PV system including:
• 14 x 405 W black mono panels
• 14 x IQ7+ Enphase micro inverters
. Enphase Envoy
. AC Charger (a 5kW FOX unit but not sure of the model number)
A FOX ESS Hybrid Energy Cube battery storage system including:
• 3 x 4.1 KWh Energy Cube batteries

I have recently changed to Octopus energy so hopefully I can get the 15p per unit that goes into the grid. I am on their ‘economy7’ equivalent tariff so can charge up overnight into the batteries in the winter if required.

I will need a bit of time to work out the best way of doing things to use as much of my own energy as possible. We have an electric AGA cooker (which is often off during the summer but provides a nice background heat to the house in the winter) along with a plug-in hybrid car (about 15kWh battery and 50 mile electric summer range).

Any hints tips and or points to look out for during installation and use most appreciated.

Thanks in anticipation

Mike

[dvbish2@sky.com]

Hints: Get on the Octopus Flux tariff.

[calum]

I'd look into a better monitoring setup, personally. Over time you'll learn more about how best to make use of the system, but the default monitoring from Fox is really not great (it relies on their cloud system which is slow, clunky and doesn't give you much detail).

The best alternative is to hook your inverter up via its RS485 port to a small PC (you can pick up suitable computers on eBay for ~£80 all day long) and install Home Assistant on it.
Then you can use community developed code like this https://github.com/nathanmarlor/foxess_modbus to read out the data from your system so you can see exactly what's going on in real time. And it works no matter whether your internet connection is up!

You want to make sure the installer leaves behind the special tool that is used to release the RS485 connector from the inverter, as it's a fiddly thing to do if you don't have it.