Hi, there haven’t been any comments here lately so I thought I’d update some details on my Warpverter installation.
I mentioned a while ago that on good solar production days I was running 6kW of underfloor heating for hours every day
After a only a few days of this I realised that it really was feasible to run the underfloor heating on our solar … at least during the good weather until the grey days of winter … so it occurred to me that more panels and an extra inverter might be worth investigating. Almost immediately I found 6.6kW of Jinko panels and rails, with a 5kW Growatt inverter for sale on Marketplace for $1,000 AUD … and only a couple of years old. Only catch was that I had to remove them myself.
Another catch was that they were 440w panels … so bigger than the usual … but only 15 of them. Fortunately my brother in law was visiting, so he and my wife came along to help. Just as well too coz those panels are heavy.
As soon as I got home I levelled the ground along the north facing wall of the shed, leaned all the panels against it … and hooked them up. I ran a rail all the way through to bind them together and clamped all of the bottoms together as well … then used steel cable to anchor them to the shed so they couldn’t blow away.
Hooked them up in a string of 7 and one of 8 and fed them through to the inverter inside next to the Warpverter. Hooked the Growatt up to the output of the Warpverter (which acts as my grid) … then turned on the DC.
After 60 secs of thinking and syncing … it started to feed through power … just building very slowly until it was supplying about 2.5kW … and the Warpverter output was reducing at the same rate. The normally quiet hum got quite a bit louder, which is the same as when the wife's electric blanket is on ... but hasn't seemed to have any ill effect ... and slowly fades away again when the Growatt finally runs out of solar power. The noise hangs on even if there is only one watt of power.
So of course, ever since I’ve been flogging it like crazy … and while the sun is good, the Growatt provides 5kW for hours each day and the Warpverter provides the rest. Again regularly up to another 6 or 7kW.
We put a 2,300w oil filled heater in MIL’s room on a timer and another 1,000w one to move around the house … so regularly running 9.3kW of heating for up to 7 hours a day … and the smaller ones until later at night.
Before I started the underfloor heating, the tiles were 17-18C … but after a week of running them, the highest I’ve seen them has been 31.5C. A bit extreme of course, but it holds the heat well and really does keep the home cozy. Ideally I’d run them much lower but for many more hours … but I’ll take it when I can get it.
At present, management is purely manual … and I have to keep an eye on charge rates and battery level and simply turn on or off the various heating loads to keep it smooth. This morning I wasn’t paying much attention and only checked about 10.30am … and the battery was charging at 207amps. I did see it up at about 216 but the phone rang as I was trying to take a shot and I missed it.
Of course the heaters all went back on again to take advantage of the “free” heating energy.
So … all that to say that a Warpverter seems to be comfortable to be used in an ac-coupling situation … and if I were to ever see another bargain like the last one, I reckon I’d be keen to add it as well.
The highest outputs so far were a day where the Growatt generated 37.7kWh and the Warpverter just over 40kWh ... and many others have been close to that. And we used to use an average of 20-22kWh.
I still need to tidy up the wiring to the Growatt ... and the rack sitting on top of the Warpverter is an additional dozen 47,000uF 63V capacitors hooked up in parallel with the original 6 ... for a total of 846,000uF !!!