Sanyo Hit-N system instaleed, results

[SolarCity]

I'd strongly agree with the installer on this one. You'd be surprised at how hot your loft gets in midsummer - especially with the new inverter throwing more heat out. The efficiency, and the life, of the system will reduce as the temperature rises.

 

[TrickyDicky101]

Hi Alan

My system was installed Thurs/Fri last week. Since then, I have observed a maximum peak output of 2.8kW on Saturday. Total generation to date has been c. 38kWh. Like you, the impact of cloud has been tremendous (IMO anyway): today with a clear sky I was getting 2.0ish kW at 11am, then some cloud came over at 1pm or so (and by no means was it dark or dingy at this stage) and peak dropped to c.400kW. I do wonder how much will be generated on a cloudy and rainy day - I suspect it won't be very much at all.

Best regards

Richard

 

[kate.harrison1]

Hi Richard,
Many thanks for your pm from the other forum. As you can see, I have managed to finf this one and, as you say, has some interesting posts. I am still somewhat baffled at the apparent discrepancy of peoples outputs. As I said, mine, commisioned late morning on 20th and consisting of 16 Sanyo 240HIT ( 8 west facing and 8 east facing) plus SMA400TL has now generated a total of 34.24 at close of play today> Averaged out, that is about 5.7kw per day. If the weather was cloudy, ok, but it has been pretty sunny the whole time since installation so I am, frankly disappointed. I was advised that the south facing roof was only big enough to accommodate about 6 panels bu I am beginning to wonder whether we have made a mistake and should have just had fewer panels on the directly south facing roof. I was led to understand that inverters need a certain total power output to operate efficiently and that 5 or 6 panels would not have worked well.
I can only assume that the low figures are a combination of the low sun not shining directly onto the panels and the shorter trajectory of the sun meaning that it seems to rise and set further to the south than it does say during the spring and summer.
Unless there is some fault with my system, I suppose I have to just wait and watch what happens in the spring/summer when the sun passes right overhead and SHOULD enable something close to peak output. All models I looked at sugested about 15% lower output totals for e/w than s but I seem to be getting much lass than that. Also how does the poster earlier in this thread manage to get what she does from an EAST facing array of the same size on the Scottish borders??!! Do you reckon my inverter is not well matched?

 

[kate.harrison1]

Have had my Sanyo system running for 2 weeks tomorrow consisting of 16 x N240SE10 panels with a sunnyboy inverter and so far it has made 116kwh. Orientation SSW 41 degree pitch with no shading. Best day so far was Saturday with the sunnybeam showing a lovely smooth curve and a production of 18.6kwh

Gary,
Do you mind me asking you if your output has significantly dropped this week?

 

[Gary K]

Output is dropping as the sun follows a lower path. On Saturday the system maxed out at 2.96kw between the slight hazy cloud where as in the first couple of days of being turned on it was reading 3.17kw briefly.
the last few days have made-
24th - 11.89
23rd- 12.420
22nd- 15.86
21st- 11.188
20th- 16.686
19th- 14.152
18th- 15.185

toal in 21 days is 211.66
but the weather has been good

I have registered on PVoutput as Norwich Power if you like to compare.

 

[TrickyDicky101]

I'm envious of those generation figures Gary! It will be interesting to see what happens to them when the cloudy & rainy days hit us.

Kate, I suspect neither of us are going to be blown away by our generation figures until Spring/Summer next year (love to be proved wrong, however).

 

[series530]

Hi Richard,
Many thanks for your pm from the other forum. As you can see, I have managed to finf this one and, as you say, has some interesting posts. I am still somewhat baffled at the apparent discrepancy of peoples outputs. As I said, mine, commisioned late morning on 20th and consisting of 16 Sanyo 240HIT ( 8 west facing and 8 east facing) plus SMA400TL has now generated a total of 34.24 at close of play today> Averaged out, that is about 5.7kw per day. If the weather was cloudy, ok, but it has been pretty sunny the whole time since installation so I am, frankly disappointed. I was advised that the south facing roof was only big enough to accommodate about 6 panels bu I am beginning to wonder whether we have made a mistake and should have just had fewer panels on the directly south facing roof. I was led to understand that inverters need a certain total power output to operate efficiently and that 5 or 6 panels would not have worked well.
I can only assume that the low figures are a combination of the low sun not shining directly onto the panels and the shorter trajectory of the sun meaning that it seems to rise and set further to the south than it does say during the spring and summer.
Unless there is some fault with my system, I suppose I have to just wait and watch what happens in the spring/summer when the sun passes right overhead and SHOULD enable something close to peak output. All models I looked at sugested about 15% lower output totals for e/w than s but I seem to be getting much lass than that. Also how does the poster earlier in this thread manage to get what she does from an EAST facing array of the same size on the Scottish borders??!! Do you reckon my inverter is not well matched?

Kate,

just as a quick sanity check: do you know if the arrays on each of the roofs are on different strings from the inverter? The 4000TL has two strings (AFAIK) and each has an individual MPPT tracker. If one roof was suffering from low light it would not affect the other and you would maintain a reasonable overall harvest. If, for some reason, it was wired such that the two strings were distributed across each roof I could imagine that this may cause the lower energy.

The other consideration is the amount, if any, of shading. While there may not be any hard shading due to telegraph poles or dormers, do you get any diffused shading as a result of distant trees or trees with an open structure? Hard shading is bad but diffused shading, as I think I am conclusing through reading posts on here and on other forums, can sometimes have an even worse effect.

 

[Gary K]

I'm envious of those generation figures Gary! It will be interesting to see what happens to them when the cloudy & rainy days hit us.

Back down with a bump today . Started with cloud and light rain and gradually got brighter during day
total output 2.7kwh.
Told you the weather had been good in the last week!!!

 

[TrickyDicky101]

It's somewhat worrying the feelings of elation I get when the sun breaks cloud cover and my peak hits 2.5kW (in the last day anyway) followed by the emotional doldrums as the cloud and rain strike reducing peak to 193kW.

I'm pretty sure I'll get bored of this soon enough...

 

[zeljuga]

Output is dropping as the sun follows a lower path. On Saturday the system maxed out at 2.96kw between the slight hazy cloud where as in the first couple of days of being turned on it was reading 3.17kw briefly.
the last few days have made-
24th - 11.89
23rd- 12.420
22nd- 15.86
21st- 11.188
20th- 16.686
19th- 14.152
18th- 15.185

Average above: 13.9115714 kw /day
Multiply bay 365 days = 5077.72357 kw/year
Weary optimistic for 4 kwp system (October average output month for year)

However 211.66 kw for 21day , average :10.0790476 kw/day
Multiply bay 365 days = 3678.85238 kw/Year
Realistic output for 4kwp system . But optimistic for 3.84 kwp system

 

[kate.harrison1]

Kate,

just as a quick sanity check: do you know if the arrays on each of the roofs are on different strings from the inverter? The 4000TL has two strings (AFAIK) and each has an individual MPPT tracker. If one roof was suffering from low light it would not affect the other and you would maintain a reasonable overall harvest. If, for some reason, it was wired such that the two strings were distributed across each roof I could imagine that this may cause the lower energy.

The other consideration is the amount, if any, of shading. While there may not be any hard shading due to telegraph poles or dormers, do you get any diffused shading as a result of distant trees or trees with an open structure? Hard shading is bad but diffused shading, as I think I am conclusing through reading posts on here and on other forums, can sometimes have an even worse effect.

Ian, Thanks for your response to my query. Yes< is am pretty sure that it has been set up as two strings. There are separate DC isolator boxes beside the inverter clearly marked 'east' and 'west' and , when you tap the screen to light up the display,it flashes voltag/amps with a visual for 2 sides of panels. I'm sure you know what I am talking about!
As far as shding is concerned, there is none but on both sides, the sun is getting so low now that it sort of shines a glancing blow if that makes sense which is why, right now, I am regretting not overruling all advice(from 4 firms) and insisting on a string of 6 (all that would fit on hip roof`) on south facing roof, with its own inverter, plus a further whack of however many ~I could grt on either east or west, again, with a searate inverter. I suspect that the east might surpass the west.

As I said to Richard, you can only work with what you have got and perhaps come spring, when the sun is over the ridge again, my system will clock in early, fly on both sides in the middle part of the day, and clock off late: that was what I was told by all. In the meantime, it seems I will have to just put up with low production although when compared to outputs from Gary for the same dates in Norwich, there seems to be more than a 15% loss for being e/w. I will try to get figures from Sunny Explorer and post them for comparison.
Also, slightly concerning , on Saturday(22nd Oct) probably the sunniest in the last few days, we were away in Reading for the day and when we got back and I looked at the SBeam, it showed a weird drop out for a couple of hours. I queried it with my installer who has promised that the electrician will come and see me as soon as he can but having read the thread about compatibility issues with Sanyo/SMA, I wonder whether this may be happening too. On one of the other days, it also showed a sudden weird spike over the max capacity of our system and likely impossible especially at this time of year. I will try to get screen shots or photos but the technology may just beat me.
Probably not worth worrying too much at this stage. Will have to let them take down scaffold and live with it for a few months, see what happens come spring and summer. If it still seems to be underperforming, I am fairly confident that my installer will address the issues.

 

[kate.harrison1]

I'm envious of those generation figures Gary! It will be interesting to see what happens to them when the cloudy & rainy days hit us.

Kate, I suspect neither of us are going to be blown away by our generation figures until Spring/Summer next year (love to be proved wrong, however).

I think you might be right and we have to be patient and wait and see but I will be keeping a close eye (see my long post response to Ian)>
The next few days look like being pretty s*** so, I dont expect much more that 1 or 2 kw. I agree, it is pretty sad, watching the Sunny Beam all the time and being totally preoccupied but, we have all invested a great deal of hard-earned cash and want to feel we have done the best we can.

 

[series530]

Kate,

If my system was live I would be very happy to share data with you. Much to my annoyance, Enecsys still haven't supplied the inverters so I cannot. Our roof is SSW and we have some shading at various parts of the day (hence micro inversion). I'm looking forward to the possibility of monitoring each panel separately and being able to visually correlate sun. cloud and shade with energy harvest... well, that's the theory anyway. I remember looking at a few sample Enecsys live systems on the web while I was considering a purchase and it was very interesting to note that, on a single array, there could be a pretty wide variation of instantaneous panel harvest and that this variation fluctuated pretty wildly each and every time the data was updated. This was not consistent with shade because shade would have been fairly constant. In my mind it had to be clouds moving over the array. Unfortunately, being web based, my point of monitoring wasn't close to the installations so I could not not correlate yield with what was physically happening.
With string based arrays, as I understand it, the MPPT tracker will try to tune to the overall array capability and this capability will err toward the harvest of the least performing panel in that string (unless the bypass diodes kick in). On a cloudy day and with low light, the system performance will tend to follow this rule. As a consequence, your harvest will be a sum of the performance of each of your two strings and each string will tend toward the lowest performing panel. If you are east west, the potential harvest will be that bit lower and your harvest will be held back because of it. I suspect that, come the spring, when the light levels are higher, the overall harvest per panel will be much higher and the effects of things like cloud cover will be mitigated by the bypass diodes coming into operation when clouds pass over parts of the panels. With bypass diodes in circuit, although the tracker will still perform in the same way, the bypass diodes will temporarily switch out sections of panels that are cloudy and thus keep the operating point of the whole string at a higher yield.


I think you will need to grin and bear it for a bit and see how things go. East west will never be as good as due south but it should be decent enough output on a sunny day.

 

[SolarCity]

Also, slightly concerning , on Saturday(22nd Oct) probably the sunniest in the last few days, we were away in Reading for the day and when we got back and I looked at the SBeam, it showed a weird drop out for a couple of hours. I queried it with my installer who has promised that the electrician will come and see me as soon as he can but having read the thread about compatibility issues with Sanyo/SMA, I wonder whether this may be happening too. On one of the other days, it also showed a sudden weird spike over the max capacity of our system and likely impossible especially at this time of year. I will try to get screen shots or photos but the technology may just beat me. .

Hi Kate,

This sounds like it may be a grid voltage issue. Ask your electrician to check to make sure the voltage isn't too high. The voltages in homes tends to peak at around midday for a few reasons so it would be a good idea for your electrician to come and see you at that time. If the voltage is going beyond 253v then you can speak to your DNO and ask them to reduce the voltage. 253v is the maximum voltage that DNO's are permitted to distribute at.

 

[JohnBoyZ]

Hi Kate,

This sounds like it may be a grid voltage issue. Ask your electrician to check to make sure the voltage isn't too high. The voltages in homes tends to peak at around midday for a few reasons so it would be a good idea for your electrician to come and see you at that time. If the voltage is going beyond 253v then you can speak to your DNO and ask them to reduce the voltage. 253v is the maximum voltage that DNO's are permitted to distribute at.

I agree with you biggs but also get the electrician to check the grid settings on the inverter.
It has been known for an installer to assume the inverter is set to G83/1 but some 4000TL's are configured with G59/2 as factory default.
G59/2 has a two stage over voltage, (Stage 1 = 253v, stage 2=264.5v) whereas G83/1 has just the one over voltage limit at 264v. So G83/1 is more forgiving but of course it depends what the installer has agreed with the DNO. I'm guessing its G83/1 but if it the grid connection is agreed at G59/2 then the installer might get permission from the DNO to increase the stage 1 limits rather than the DNO reducing the voltage.

 

[SolarCity]

This is true but I'd argue that if the voltage is getting too high then you are going to want to get it lowered anyway. Voltages above 253v are not good idea. Electronic equipment will have shorter life and you will use more energy.

 

[JohnBoyZ]

This is true but I'd argue that if the voltage is getting too high then you are going to want to get it lowered anyway. Voltages above 253v are not good idea. Electronic equipment will have shorter life and you will use more energy.

Here here, couldn't agree more.

"Could always install a VPhase"

Who said that!l

Cheers
John

 

[Aquinas_Quark]

Hi Alan

My system was installed Thurs/Fri last week. Since then, I have observed a maximum peak output of 2.8kW on Saturday. Total generation to date has been c. 38kWh. Like you, the impact of cloud has been tremendous (IMO anyway): today with a clear sky I was getting 2.0ish kW at 11am, then some cloud came over at 1pm or so (and by no means was it dark or dingy at this stage) and peak dropped to c.400kW. I do wonder how much will be generated on a cloudy and rainy day - I suspect it won't be very much at all.

Best regards

Richard

Hi Richard (and greetings to all; I started this thread and see it has turned into a mini-epic! great!), my results:
15 x Sanyo Hit-N240SE 10 panels, Fronius IG-TL 3.6 so 3.6kW peak, Poole, Dorset, very near south facing 40 degree pitch, slight morning shade from tree. First operating day 14 Oct, total to this evening (18 days) 137 kWh (average 7.6kWh per day),
Best day 28 Oct. 14 kWh, worst 27th not even 1 kWh (!). I did see the output peak momentarily at just OVER 3.6 one day!!
Amazing how variable the output is - I know our eyes adjust to compensate for dim light but even so, output can be near 3kW one moment and down to 600W in a few seconds, so the real brightness is easily varying 10:1 - or more.
We are in during the day so have been running up and down stairs switching immersion heater/leccy radiators and blowers on and off, chasing the clouds across the sky - the exercise alone is warming the house!
I am trying to get a site transformer 240 to 110V to run the immersion heater (so 1/4 power, about 700W) and thinking about a storage heater to maybe charge over 2 days if it can be insulated; I wonder about power control whether a triac firing into a heavy load would give the inverter problems; would prefer to relay-switch a tapped transformer perhaps (with a delay so it's not on/off/on/off continually of course). I must ask the good doctor Fronius if his inverter can handle a chopped load waveform or not.
PS if your system gives you 400kW when cloudy I'll give you 50 grand for it....
Cheers
Alan

 

[Aquinas_Quark]

Output is dropping as the sun follows a lower path. On Saturday the system maxed out at 2.96kw between the slight hazy cloud where as in the first couple of days of being turned on it was reading 3.17kw briefly.
the last few days have made-
24th - 11.89
23rd- 12.420
22nd- 15.86
21st- 11.188
20th- 16.686
19th- 14.152
18th- 15.185

Average above: 13.9115714 kw /day
Multiply bay 365 days = 5077.72357 kw/year
Weary optimistic for 4 kwp system (October average output month for year)

However 211.66 kw for 21day , average :10.0790476 kw/day
Multiply bay 365 days = 3678.85238 kw/Year
Realistic output for 4kwp system . But optimistic for 3.84 kwp system

Excellent figures - where are you?
Cheers

 

[Gary K]

Excellent figures - where are you?
Cheers

They are my output figures and I am in Norwich.