Welcome @Jonathanprentice ,

Nice work getting solar! We’ve got something to give you for that, so please bear with me while I ask the forum moderators to press a few buttons in Control so your Profile can be updated.

If I understand your question correctly, your Solar panels will always be used first if sufficient juice is available, followed by your Battery. If you’re not using much Solar juice, then some of that can be used to charge the Battery for later, such as overnight usage.

Anything that exceeds what the Solar Panels and Battery can give you will come from the National Grid and be charged for. It’s also worth noting that a small amount of Grid power is needed to manage your two systems.

Hi @Jonathanprentice and welcome to this customer forum. 

Some of what happens to your solar PV and battery power depends on how the system is set up. Generally, this will be to supply the property first and then charge batteries second. The third phase is to send excess to the grid. 

What can happen depending on your system, is that as power demand changes, the system can’t always keep in step and so you might see occasional draws or feeds into/from the grid. Power switching is still behind some of the demand frequency and as the whole system needs an immediate balance in place you might see what you describe. 

One other thing to bear in mind is that the system might be programmed to top up the battery charge overnight if it is below a threshold. 
Just for interest, what type of system and inverter control do you have?

3.3kw panels

3.6kw solex  inverter

5.8kw solax battery 

That sounds similar to mine although I have a LuxPower inverter and Pylontech batteries. 
I presume you use SolaX cloud to monitor the system?

Yep really happy with the system. Saving so much money. Did loads of research first. Used good company.  Thanks for the advice

Yes I have the solax cloud. Not bad app. 

Can I ask a question. How come I have 3.7kw system but I can draw 4.0kw or sometimes more. Don’t understand that. 

Perhaps a combination of solar plus battery?

Thanks for the help. 
 

just out of curious I use 140 watts per day if I’m not in the house all day, so go away for a day. Is this normal. How much do other people use for this situation!

If you mean 140Wh (so 0.14kWh) then that sounds rather good to me. We tend to use between 1 and 2 kWh as we have a 9kw shower which draws more than the system can supply. 

Tell me about it my wife had a shower in our 10kw electric shower and my heart skipped a bit when the smart meter shot up.!!!!

thanks for the advice 

My instruction to the family now is “before you switch on the kettle, microwave, oven, air fryer, hair dryer, washing machine, tumble dryer or shower, check what else is switched on!”

So true!!!!  

We have a solar installation with a solax battery. The fitting was completed in June of this year. I noticed that from mid September onwards out electricity consumption has doubled ( it may have happened earlier and been masked by general usage. There are regular surges that show up on the smart  metre and on OVO.

There can be between 3 to 6 each day  for example 3rd december ½ hour at 12.30. 2.3 to 4 am , 6.30 to 8.30.

This is from the 3rd december and these surges totalled 13.4kwh. It happens at night as well. We have  now isolated the fault to the solar installation by switching off circuits and consumer units

We are baffled as to what is going on. Before we approach the installer, we would like to know if anyone has any explanation. I did mention it to the company who did a cursory check of the installation and said it works! the explanation they gave me was that the early morning surges were because of my standby lights!

Anyone any ideas?

Hey @Caroline Roberts,

Welcome to the OVO Online Community,

I’ve moved this topic to ‘Smart Home’ so that it gets more views from Community Members with similar green tech.

Hi @Caroline Roberts , I can’t quite see what level of individual ‘surges’ you are looking at. 
There is a time when the inverter juggles input from the solar vs what is required by the property but that should be fairly limited in power. 
Another possibility is that the inverter is pre-programmed to top up the battery at certain points. If you have access to the inverter control you should be able to check that

The surges were approx 2kwh, but we have sorted the problem , the ct device has been incorrectly connected causing the battery to pull down from the grid to top up .  This has been verified by Solax. So it is an installation fault 

Hey @Caroline Roberts 

Glad to hear you’ve got to the bottom of that issue.

If there’s ever anything else we can help out with, always feel free to pop back to the Forum.