Late to the Party

[parody]

After stalling for so long because of the frankly ridiculous pricing of commercially installed solar, I've now installed my own system. I was fortunate enough to have plenty of ground floor roof space in fairly optimal south facing positions, on top of a rear extension and garage. So far I have:

• 1 array with Solis 1.5kw inverter, 3x455w panels + current/voltage matched 2x200w panels (of a different shape take advantage of the space available.
• 2 array with Solis 2kw inverter, 6x360w panels + current/voltage matched 455w panel
• Solis 3kw AC coupled battery inverter with 170ah 48v lead acid batteries (40% DOC should be good for 2-3years of daily cycles according to specs). I'm babying them by configuring the inverter to try fully charge and discharge daily rather than constant flux of in/out.
• 2 x wifi and 1x LAN data logging stick all going to solis cloud (pretty good data presentation)
• Battery has a (4x12v) independent balancer/equaliser and health monitoring

I plan to:

• Build or buy a lithium based battery. I'm thinking of going down the ex-hybrid-car battery route, came here to research that and how to get a solis compatible BMS going.
• Add 3x tigo optimisers on 3 panels which experience some shading from trees and, due to angles, from some other panels due to low winter sun and flat roof mounting. These seem to be as rare as unicorn poop right now.

For the cost of all this compared to a professional install I am mighty impressed. We also have a hybrid car, so in the winter the LA batteries aren't getting that much charge. Before next summer I'd like to have the lithium battery going as I expect this will really motor (pardon the pun). It did this summer but I have since expanded it and added the battery.

Look forward to chatting! I've gained a fair bit of knowledge now (I'm an ex engineer and current software consultant) so hoping I can help others too.