June 17, 20224 yr I have just had a new installation done at my home in Hillcrest and the installer did a fantastic job.Kelvin Strachan was the installer. The specs of the job are as follows. 12 x 425w canadian solar panels Luxpower ECO hybrid inverter SNA 5000 WPV 5.5 Kw Hubble lithium battery. My roof pitch is 31 deg and faces directly North. Andy from Aspergo was amazing in helping us with the settings on the inverter. I have been running some tests and even at midday with full sun (It is winter) ,i slowly turn on the big draw appliances in the house and the max output from the panels is about 2.6kw. I have a total of 5.1kw on the roof and I realise that this figure is based on standard test conditions but I thought that I should get at least 3.5kw from the panels. Is this likely to improve in Summer. Also I have noticed that the battery often feeds in power to the house along with the panels when its clearly not needed. Its not a huge amount and it doesnt continue for long but it is quite odd. I am more concerned about the output of the system and is this normal to be so far off the total potential of what the panels . Regards Nicholas
June 17, 20224 yr Hi. How about some pictures? Always nice to see other installations. I currently get 3600W out of 4000W my array, which equals 90%. All North @ 26 degrees pitch.
June 17, 20224 yr Author 10 of the panels in the pic taken right now are direct North facing and the other 2 are horizontal but get a lot of sun
June 17, 20224 yr Author 25 minutes ago, JacquesVDM said: Hi. How about some pictures? Always nice to see other installations. I currently get 3600W out of 4000W my array, which equals 90%. All North @ 26 degrees pitch. I just posted some pics of the panels and inverter etc
June 17, 20224 yr 8 hours ago, Nicholas Strachan said: I have just had a new installation done at my home in Hillcrest and the installer did a fantastic job.Kelvin Strachan was the installer. The specs of the job are as follows. 12 x 425w canadian solar panels Luxpower ECO hybrid inverter SNA 5000 WPV 5.5 Kw Hubble lithium battery. My roof pitch is 31 deg and faces directly North. Andy from Aspergo was amazing in helping us with the settings on the inverter. I have been running some tests and even at midday with full sun (It is winter) ,i slowly turn on the big draw appliances in the house and the max output from the panels is about 2.6kw. I have a total of 5.1kw on the roof and I realise that this figure is based on standard test conditions but I thought that I should get at least 3.5kw from the panels. Is this likely to improve in Summer. Also I have noticed that the battery often feeds in power to the house along with the panels when its clearly not needed. Its not a huge amount and it doesnt continue for long but it is quite odd. I am more concerned about the output of the system and is this normal to be so far off the total potential of what the panels . Regards Nicholas Would require a little more information on your configuration to comment - Panels: Are all 12 panels in a single array, running single/dual MPPT (should correspond to first point)? As soon as you introduce panels with different azimuth or elevation in the same array, you are likely to affect the entire array (Same as shading). Battery: Battery feeding into the load is likely to be based on configuration of the inverter and hence need to look at listing your timings and relevant capacities (SOC). I.E. Compare configuration against the time you are experiencing the battery feed. Is it always in the same window of time or random? There is a similar thread in this regard, which you may find interesting -
June 17, 20224 yr I didn't want to say anything at first, but am also thinking that those two panels that are on a different angle will pull the rest down to its production output. Could you possibly disconnect those two from the rest of the string?
June 17, 20224 yr With a 39.7Vmp one would assume 2 strings are used as the MPPT is good for 385V. Nicholas will have to provide how the 12 are connected. A guess will be 2p x 6 in series. Then the 6 in a normal plane to North will do well but the 2nd string with the 2 flat will produce much lower. This seems to be reason for the low yield. 2p x 5s could produce more I guess. Edited June 17, 20224 yr by Scorp007
June 17, 20224 yr 5 hours ago, Nicholas Strachan said: 10 of the panels in the pic taken right now are direct North facing and the other 2 are horizontal but get a lot of sun Possibly move that one single panel on the left up to the top of the roof like the others. Then place the two "lone" panels inline with the one "landscape" panel across the smaller open roof. This is all dependent on enough space been available. Then both strings should perform equally. Welcome to the world of power independence. 👍
June 18, 20224 yr 14 hours ago, Nicholas Strachan said: I realise that the max that I could get off a 5100w set of panels would only be about 3600 or maybe a bit more but the amount I am getting seems a bit low. It does seem a little low, even for nearly winter solstice. Do you have shading? Poor tilt or orientation?
June 18, 20224 yr On 2022/06/17 at 9:22 AM, Nicholas Strachan said: I have a total of 5.1kw on the roof and I realise that this figure is based on standard test conditions but I thought that I should get at least 3.5kw from the panels. Is this likely to improve in Summer. Definitely YES. I have the main set of panels on 26° roof pitch north-west (300°) oriented. I experienced in September to March sometimes up to 110% of data sheet output value before the panels heat up from the sun. During winter months I only get 60 to 80%. I notice that here (Garden Route) in winter months the sky is rarely fully clear, almost always some dizzy haze if not overcast. That reduces sun power. Edited June 18, 20224 yr by Beat
June 18, 20224 yr 18 hours ago, TimCam said: Possibly move that one single panel on the left up to the top of the roof like the others. Then place the two "lone" panels inline with the one "landscape" panel across the smaller open roof. This is all dependent on enough space been available. Then both strings should perform equally. Welcome to the world of power independence. 👍 Following some other posts it was mentioned what the angle of panels can do to the output. Here is an example of lifting a single panel from 20 to 35 degrees on a car port. Output moved up from about 305 to 350W. If it was taken to 50 degrees which is the better angle for June then I am sure the gain would have been even more. I still feel the 2 flat panels of Nicolas is bringing the whole series string down and can be improved with even less than the 12 panels by keeping to the same angle on the roof. There was a time that I disconnected 2 of 5 panels in the afternoon as they caused a bottle neck effect due to shade on them after 15h00. Later I got rid of the shade.
June 19, 20224 yr Author Hi all and many thanks for the feedback.What we are going to do is move the 2 panels that are lying flatish onto my main roof which is of the same pitch and North orientation and see how that goes.Its interesting the concept of a few badly performing panels dragging down the overall output but I shall keep you posted as they should be moved this coming week.Unfortunately due to various issues on the garage roof where all the other panels are we cannot move or juggle with how they are now. Many thanks
June 19, 20224 yr Author 21 hours ago, Scorp007 said: Following some other posts it was mentioned what the angle of panels can do to the output. Here is an example of lifting a single panel from 20 to 35 degrees on a car port. Output moved up from about 305 to 350W. If it was taken to 50 degrees which is the better angle for June then I am sure the gain would have been even more. I still feel the 2 flat panels of Nicolas is bringing the whole series string down and can be improved with even less than the 12 panels by keeping to the same angle on the roof. There was a time that I disconnected 2 of 5 panels in the afternoon as they caused a bottle neck effect due to shade on them after 15h00. Later I got rid of the shade. Thanks for that.I shall move the 2 horizontal ones onto my main roof which also has a pitch of 31 deg which corresponds closely to the lat where i am and lets see.Many thanks
June 20, 20224 yr Author On 2022/06/17 at 7:13 PM, JacquesVDM said: I didn't want to say anything at first, but am also thinking that those two panels that are on a different angle will pull the rest down to its production output. Could you possibly disconnect those two from the rest of the string? Thanks for the feedback.We are going to move them to the main roof which has the same pitch and North direction so that should help
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