Intelly Power Kit for moinitoring and heating water

Miss Sunshine · May 30, 2012

Hi there,

We have a customer that would like a monitoring system for a 30kW field mounted system. The system has SMA inverters but the distance and barriers between the array and property mean that blue tooth monitoring systems are useless.

We have read about the Intelly Power kit (and spoken to them) which seems the perfect solution as the monitor is linked to the generation meter as opposed to the inverter and then transmits info to the in house display unit, however Intelly power are also pushing the full intelly power kit. The full kit will allow our customer to use the PV energy to heat hot water by connecting a smart switch to the immersion tank. The customer is thinking of installing underfloor heating so take it that he could use kit to heat this too.

Has anyone got experience of fitting these kits (time it takes - do you need plumber to adjust immersion tank) and what feedback have you had from customers?

Worcester · May 30, 2012

Best solution would be Webbox with RS485 connections to the inverters (more reliable than bluetooth) locate the webbox next to the inverters, then depending upon distance either an ethernet connection from the webbox to the router (nice and reliable) or else one of these connected to the webbox NETGEAR WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet Adapter at cheap prices | Pcworld - assuming the client's router is wifi enables, else get them a wifi enabled one. NETGEAR N150 DGN1000 Wireless ADSL Router at cheap prices | Pcworld (it supports both NAT and DynDNS)

if you need to extend the range of the wifi, these are excellent, unfortunately they do occasionally need a reboot : TP Link TL-WA830RE 300Mbps Wireless N Range Extender: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

As for the imersion switch, for a 30kWp system, don't use the intelly power one, go for Emma from coolpower, theres stuff about it our site or go to Emma Brochures - Coolpower Products UK - Smart Sustainable Energy it's much much better - it works on the EXCESS energy - i.e. what would be exported and scales as nescessary as opposed to just switching a load on. It has three phase options and can scale up to 30kW.

We do this kind of thing all the time and it works very well.

p.s. you don't normally need a plumber, just a network engineer and an electrician