Are you really getting value for your money with your Solar PV System? Is there a difference in your electricity bill after installing this sophisticated Solar PV System. Well, maybe it is a good idea to start from identifying your current setup when we attempt to answer these difficult questions. But as we learn more about these issues, we are however not supposed to go and change our inverter settings this is not recommended. Ultimately, the idea is to learn the tricks and share them with your service provider. Let’s then take deep dive.
Identifying your current installation setup
There are many inverter brands out there, but they all work on similar principles. For examples, all inverters have a display where you can see the current operating mode of the inverter. Inverter will display four elements e.g. “Solar Array”, “Battery”, “Grid/Utility” and “Load/House consumption”. The more expensive the inverter is, it will give more information like power in Kilo Watts (kW). Some will show arrows or even graphic presentation of power consumption like in the example of this Deye inverter below.
Even if you have to look at a Luxpower inverter below. It also displays the four elements: Solar Power, Grid, Batteries and Load. As you can see.
Since, you can now see if the Solar Array if connected or Grid is connected by observing the lines in between these elements. It is going to be easy to identify the current installation setup. What do we mean about “installation setup”? Well, you need to identify what source of power is your PV System using to power your house or load.
I am sure you will agree if you use the Grid or utility as little as possible. You will save money on your electricity. Yes, absolutely if you use the Solar Power and batteries as an alternative and use the power coming from the Sun and charged batteries. You are a winner!
So, if you look at Figure 1, you will see that the utility /grid is at 0.72kW (Kio Watt) and the Solar power is 0kW. This means this setup is using the Grid most of the time. I am sure you can see this setup is not ideal to save money.
On the other hand, in Figure 2, the System is not using the Grid. It uses the Solar Power from the PV Array. I say this because there is no line between the inverter and Grid. But there is a line between the inverter and the Solar Panels and one between the battery and the inverter. It goes without saying the send setup will save up money on our electricity bill.
I can assure you in any type of setup, the above two setups are the most common irrespective of inverter brand you could be using.
What then do you do if you discover that your inverter set is not ideal to save money?
Changing inverter settings not recommended:
As an installer myself I strongly discourage the act of trying to change inverter settings of an installed Solar PV System. It will however cause no harm to have a discussion with the service provider to share ideas as to how the electrical bill can be reduced and save money? This will show the service provider that you want value for your money and anyway you purchased the system to be energy efficient and save costs.
Now, some high-end inverters can also be programmed to use the Grid between certain times. For example, use grid between 17H00 to 08H00 the next money. The other settings can be to only use Solar power to charge the batteries and not grid power. Furthermore, you can setup the system to discharge the batteries until they are 40% left. Instead of using the grid, you then use Solar power plus battery discharge power. Then eventually use the grid. So, you might use the grid 35% of the time and the 65% will comes from the batteries and solar power. Learn more about Solar PV installation beyond the basics by previewing the an online course on Udemy.