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Mad Inventor™
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@binky, evening. Mate has just been touted by a company called Solaredge. He already has 8 PV panels and a Sunny Boy inverter. 

This bloke wants to sell him 8 optimizers and a new Solaredge inverter for £4K.  This on the basis his old inverter is only 85% efficient and the new Solaredge one 95% efficient. They'll buy back his Sunny Boy for £500 so £3.5K all in. Rekons it'll make his system 25% more efficient overall.

My mate then rang the crowd who did his panels then latterly storage batteries and they've said they can do the same thing for £2.5K.

All sounds b@llocks to me?

 
This is when you know the bottom has fallen out of the solar market, I mean really targeting existing solar customers because you know that they are ‘in’ on the global warming issues, that’s low. 

 
I'll keep it simple - GARBAGE.

Unless he has a very old inverter then the Euro-efficiency rating is 95% for an older Sunny Boy. (unless he has a  very old model which isn't 'transformerless' ).

Optimisers can only add 25% if there are serious shading issues. Even then Sunny Boys have a feature called 'Global Optitracking' which is a shade compensation algorithm. I did have a report on optimisers versus a standard inverter from an independent tester called Photon International (German trade magazine) They can impove output when shading is an issue, but the report used a Grade B inveter, SMAs are 'Triple A' rated, and even then the gain wasn't as high as 25%.. Now optimisers are around £30each, a solaraedge inverter around £800, so that's about £1040. Scaffold, say £600, so that's £1640 - you can pay me £1k to fit it if you like - think that will cover my diesel  :slap

A new SB is around £750 if you want the latest spec which runs at 96-98% efficiency at all but the lowest light levels. There's also nothing to stop you doing this work yourself anyway. Somethig like a Chinese Solis inverter is about £600 fitted - doesn't have shade compensation, and won't last as long, but efficiency is on par with SMA (more or less). I'm guesiing tht he has about 2kW of panels,, which should output around 2000kWh per year, so assuing the high original tariff of around 50p, then even if he did get 25% more that's worth about £250 per year, so even at £2.5k, that's 10 year payback. 

I've attached a Photon Report - it wasn't the one I was looking for and it's annoying as it doesn't say what the base inverter was. NB where there is no shading or even if the panels  are dirty there can be small performance increases as the system doesn't have to compensate for differences in the panels themselves. I do fit Solaredge where shading is notable, btu other than that the additional cost does not merit the outputs gained.

View attachment solaredge-case-study-photon-power-optimizers-1473941071.pdf

 
Tonight he has someone coming round to talk about him having an ASHP...


If he lives in built up area he may need to check noise levels, we installed 5 of these in adjacent gardens and when they all run up it sounded like the helicopters were doing manoeuvres above, the neighbours involved the council and noise tests had to be done it was quite a hassle.  

 
So the man came round....from Think Green Energy. Didn't have any brochures or even leave a card.

Seemingly they felt an ASHP was the wrong thing as quite expensive so he tried to sell them a "pv optimiser that limits the voltage going to the inverter". British made in Sheffield. He showed them a photo of a burnt out time clock that was running on 240V instead of 230V! This makes them overheat and give up. AND it would prolong the life of the inverter.

£2500 in the sale that ends today funnily enough!

If he doesn't take his commission he could do it for £2100!

Bloke was there 3 hours!

Amazingly my mate didn't go for it!

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Perhaps your mates realised that you’ve never said that his house is in danger as he’s the only one in the country running at 240v. He must trust your judgement !!

 

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